花花花 SuperLaserNino 花花花It's a website!http://ninoan.com
Are rails partials actually slow?<p>At my previous job, we were told not to use partials to clean up our view code, because each rendering of a partial would add around 10ms to the overall response time. After I was told this I did a quick test in my dev environment, but I’d never actually tested the claim on production … until today!</p>
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<h1 id="the-setup">The setup</h1>
<p>I created a new rails project and generated a scaffold I called <code class="highlighter-rouge">things</code>. On the index page, underneath the auto-generated table, I put the following:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>&lt;% if params[:manypartials].present? %&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Many partials:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;% 1000.times do %&gt;
&lt;%= render "simplepartial", iterations: 1 %&gt;
&lt;% end %&gt;
&lt;% else %&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One big partial:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;%= render "simplepartial", iterations: 1000 %&gt;
&lt;% end %&gt;
</code></pre></div>
<p>I then created the partial <code class="highlighter-rouge">simplepartial</code> and added this code:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>&lt;% iterations.times do %&gt;
&lt;p&gt;This is a simple partial. Hello from the partial!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;% end %&gt;
</code></pre></div>
<h1 id="results">Results</h1>
<p>I launched the dev server with <code class="highlighter-rouge">rails s</code> and the production server with <code class="highlighter-rouge">rails s -e production</code>. I ran</p>
<p><code class="highlighter-rouge">time curl "http://0.0.0.0:3000/things?manypartials=true" &gt; /dev/null</code></p>
<p>and</p>
<p><code class="highlighter-rouge">time curl "http://0.0.0.0:3000/things" &gt; /dev/null</code></p>
<p>to make the requests. (The pipe to <code class="highlighter-rouge">/dev/null</code> is to reduce the time spent printing stuff to the terminal.)</p>
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th> </th>
<th style="text-align: right">Many partials</th>
<th style="text-align: right">One big partial</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>Dev</td>
<td style="text-align: right">44.365s</td>
<td style="text-align: right">0.852s</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Production</td>
<td style="text-align: right">0.273s</td>
<td style="text-align: right">0.152s</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>So it seems that rendering 1000 partials will cause around 100–200ms of extra rendering time. That’s certainly not great, but it may not be too high a price to pay for HTML templates not growing to thousands of lines.</p>
Sun, 04 Mar 2018 21:38:04 +0000http://ninoan.com/slow-partials/
http://ninoan.com/slow-partials/DPI-dependent CSS in Atom and everywhere else too<p>When programming on low-resolution screens,
I like to use 10pt Monaco with antialiasing turned off.
But when switching to my MacBook’s retina display,
I want antialiasing turned back on.
Until now, I would manually comment/uncomment some CSS
in Atom’s <code class="highlighter-rouge">styles.less</code> file to change this.</p>
<p>Turns out, you can define
<a href="https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/retina-display-media-query/">CSS rules based on the current screen resolution</a>.
By adding the following to <code class="highlighter-rouge">styles.less</code>,
Atom automatically switches the font and antialiasing settings
as soon as you move the window from one screen to the other:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>atom-text-editor {
@media (-webkit-max-device-pixel-ratio: 1), (max-resolution: 150dpi) {
.line {
-webkit-font-smoothing: none;
font-family: Monaco;
font-size: 10;
transform: translateX(1px);
font-style: normal !important;
* {
font-style: normal !important;
}
}
}
}
</code></pre></div>
<p>The <code class="highlighter-rouge">transform</code> line is there because
Atom will sometimes cut off the first column of pixels
when antialiasing is turned off.</p>
Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/dpi-css/
http://ninoan.com/dpi-css/Smooth cursor motion in Atom<p>I’m currently trying out Atom as the main tool for my computer job and I wanted to make it more fun, so I added some CSS to make the cursor move smoothly and give the text-selection rounded corners. To try it yourself, click click on <em>Stylesheet</em> in the <em>Atom</em> menu and paste this code:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>atom-text-editor .cursor {
transition: all 80ms;
}
atom-text-editor .selection {
border-radius: 4px;
transition: all 20ms;
}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Now everything is nice and smooth. Yay!</p>
Sun, 08 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/smooth-cursor-motion/
http://ninoan.com/smooth-cursor-motion/Big numbers, small numbers<p>You don’t want things to be complicated.
I get it.
I am here to help.
Don’t worry, it’s all going to be over soon.</p>
<!--more-->
<ul id="markdown-toc">
<li><a href="#preamble--skip-this-section-if-you-dont-care" id="markdown-toc-preamble--skip-this-section-if-you-dont-care">Preamble – skip this section if you don’t care</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-solution--read-this-part" id="markdown-toc-the-solution--read-this-part">The solution – read this part</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 id="preamble--skip-this-section-if-you-dont-care">Preamble – skip this section if you don’t care</h1>
<p>Having numbers and letters in the same text is a difficult challenge for typography:
Arabic numerals have a completely different origin, and thus completely different shapes than roman letters.
If you just <em>somehow</em> throw them in the middle of your text, the numbers will look out of place.
But (let’s pretend) you want them to look like they fit in.
You don’t want your numbers to show up at their friend’s party and someone walks up to <del>you</del> them and is like, “So how do you know the host?”, and <del>you’re</del> the numbers are like, <del>“I study physics with them,”</del> “We come from the other end of the world,” and the person is like, “Haha yeah, I figured, from the way you look.”
Because that would be embarrassing.</p>
<p>So the typography friends all sat down together and adapted numbers to look more like letters.
Since there are two kinds of letters, they made two kinds of numbers.
One kind to go well with upper case letters, for titles and tables, and one to go well with lower case letters, for body text.
They are called by many names, but we’ll call them upper case and lower case numbers.
Using upper case numbers in the middle of body text has the same effect as using ALL CAPS in the middle of body text: it makes the number seem damn important. That’s fine if the number <em>is</em> damn important, but most numbers are not.</p>
<p>Quick historical interlude from Robert Bringhurst’s <a href="https://books.google.de/books?id=940sAAAAYAAJ"><em>The elements of typographic style</em></a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>During most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, lining figures were more widely known as ‘modern’ and text figures as ‘old-style.’ Modernism was preached as a sacred duty, and numbers, in a sense, were actually deified. Modernism is nothing if not complex, but its gospel was radical simplicity. Many efforts were made to reduce the Latin alphabet back to a single case. (The telegraph and teletype, with their unicameral alphabets, are also products of that time.) These efforts failed to make much headway where letters were concerned. With numbers, the campaign had considerable success. Typewriters soon came to have letters in both upper and lower case but numbers in upper case alone. And from typewriters come computer keyboards.</p>
<p>Typographic civilization seems, nonetheless, determined to proceed. Text figures are again a normal part of type design – and have thus been retroactively supplied for faces that were earlier denied them. However common it may be, the use of titling figures in running text is illiterate: it spurns the truth of letters.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ok, let’s continue.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, uppercase numbers aren’t always bad. Especially the scientifically minded will often wish to have big tables of numbers, and the contents of tables are supposed to look nice and regular – “tabular”, you might say. In this case, it makes sense to take advantage of the uniform, blocky shapes of upper case numbers to make everything line up neatly. As a result, we’d want lower case numbers for text, and upper case numbers for tables.</p>
<p>Buuuuuuut, because fonts and the web and everything are complicated and we can be glad to even occasionally get half-decent fonts on the web at all, this is too much to ask. Instead, let’s see if we can find a middle ground where everyone is only sorta unhappy.</p>
<h1 id="the-solution--read-this-part">The solution – read this part</h1>
<p>From what we’ve learned in the last section, if you ever want to have a table with numbers in your text, using lowercase numbers is kind of a nonstarter. Instead, we’re aiming for uppercase numbers that are less awful.</p>
<p>Let’s look at some fonts:</p>
<figure>
<img src="http://ninoan.com/images/big-numbers.PNG" alt="A selection of fonts, demonstrating how they handle numbers" />
<figcaption>A number and a typo. From top to bottom: Times, EB Garamond, Palatino, Hoefler Text, Gentium Book.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p class="right half"><img src="http://ninoan.com/images/heights.JPG" alt="Different heights that exist in fonts" /></p>
<p>In the first and third line (Times New Roman, Palatino), the problem is clearly visible: the numbers are absolutely gigantic and distract from the text. In the second and fourth line (EB Garamond, Hoefler Text), lowercase numbers emulate the dynamics of the text and thus blend in better. In the fifth line (Gentium Book), the numbers are upper case and thus usable for tables and titles, but they aren’t obnoxiously huge. Now, the makers of Gentium did not just scale down the numbers and call it a day. Instead, they lowered the entire cap height (see picture on the right or possibly above). This is especially visible in the “The” at the beginning of the line; the “T” is much shorter than the “h”. As a result, lowercase letters can retain their ascender height and don’t look squished, and numbers (which have cap-height) aren’t obnoxious. On top of that, you get the positive side effect of having nice-looking acronyms without needing small-caps, which has been another source of constant frustration for me.</p>
<p>I first saw this technique in the font FiveThirtyEight use:</p>
<p><img src="http://ninoan.com/images/fivethirtyeight-font.JPG" alt="FiveThirtyEight sample" /></p>
<p>By the nature of their content, they need a lot of numbers and acronyms, while still wanting to maintain a generally nice-looking page. Their font solves this problem wonderfully.</p>
<p>In conclusion: If you want good looking text and not worry about things and not bother with small numbers, find a font with a small cap-height and/or large x-height, and ideally with long-enough ascenders that it doesn’t look all cheap and squished. If you’re unsure, just use Gentium Book – that one’s in Google Docs, looks cool, and has all kinds of non-latin accents and stuff too.</p>
Wed, 15 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/big-numbers/
http://ninoan.com/big-numbers/Willpower day<h1 id="background">Background</h1>
<p>I noticed I wasn’t happy with the way I spend my time. Over the last year or so I learned to structure my work habits such that I need the least amount of willpower possible to get myself to work. I tried hard to get myself to do things without requiring willpower and, in the process, built somewhat of an aversion to do anything that seemed like it might require effort. For the most part, this was good: I learned to notice moments when I just didn’t have the mental capacity to do work, and so learned not to judge myself for sometimes <em>not</em> working and instead looking at comics on the internet.</p>
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<p>On the flip-side, I have become dissatisfied with the amount of challenging activities I do in my non-work time. Too often, I spend my after-work time doing only effortless things, neglecting my desire to do low-but-finite-effort activities like reading, writing<sup id="fnref:writing-effort"><a href="#fn:writing-effort" class="footnote">1</a></sup>, or even just tidying up the apartment for a few minutes.</p>
<p>It’s not that I <em>never</em> do anything useful with my time, but I feel like I could increase the quality-density of my time by making more of an effort. Additionally, maybe spending a bit of willpower will allow me to build a habit of taking fewer (or shorter) breaks and, generally, living (at least somewhat) <em>faster</em>.</p>
<h1 id="the-experiment">The experiment</h1>
<p>So I decided to do an experiment: For one day, I spend as much willpower as I can to combat my usual slowness and aversion to effortful tasks. On the object level, this meant roughly three things:</p>
<ol>
<li>When I’m taking time to relax, instead of watching cat videos, I’ll read things, take notes, etc.</li>
<li>Whenever I’m feeling like I just want to take a break and not do <em>anything</em>, I’ll go against that urge and work anyway. The reasoning behind this is that, if it turns out I can’t focus in the moment, I can still stop working. But at least I don’t run the risk of underestimating my ability to work.</li>
<li>I resist the urge to put tasks off if I can easily do them immediately.</li>
</ol>
<h1 id="the-result">The result</h1>
<p>Overall, the results of this experiment are surprisingly unspectacular.</p>
<p>Getting up in the morning wasn’t a problem since I had an early call that I was looking forward to. After that, I tried, just for fun, to step into the shower before the water was at the right temperature. That worked … so … yay.</p>
<p>Looking at the way I spent my time during the day, it seems like noticing when I’m doing nothing, and then doing something instead, is a good idea:</p>
<figure>
<img src="/images/willpower-time.JPG" alt="Pie chart showing the distribution of activities on an average day, compared to willpower day" />
<figcaption>Time tracking results on an average day compared to Willpower Day. Making charts from spreadsheets is really difficult.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I spent significantly more time working and less time doing “break” than on the average day.</p>
<p>What makes the experiment so unspectacular is that it turned out there were actually not that many situations where I could really change anything using willpower. I could will myself to go in the cold shower, sure, and I can will myself to read a bit more, but when I can’t think because my brain is all used up, there is nothing I can do about that. There are some emails I can will myself to write faster, but when I’m faced with a mental block because of anxiety or descision fatigue, what I really need is L-theanine, not <em>more</em> stress.</p>
<p><del>The final unsurprising finding is that I got extremely tired and needed to sleep for 10½ hours after the day, plus a 90-minute nap during the day. Wow. That’s 12 hours total! Okay, let’s start this paragraph over.</del></p>
<p>As a final finding, I was quite surprised with how much extra sleep my body required just from trying to work a little more. I already need a lot of sleep, but 12 hours is a bit more than I’m happy to accept. Two caveats to the surprise:</p>
<ol>
<li>Since I had an early morning call I slept only 7½ hours the previous night, which is a bit less than my average.</li>
<li>I just today realized that there is no more caffeinated coffee in this house and I may just have been feeling strangely tired during the day because I was drinking decaf without realizing it.<sup id="fnref:caf"><a href="#fn:caf" class="footnote">2</a></sup></li>
</ol>
<h1 id="in-conclusion">In conclusion</h1>
<p>Using a bit more willpower seems good. Having regular designated willpower days may be good practice to get into the habit of being strong of will. Don’t overdo it though.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:writing-effort">
<p>Calling writing “low-effort” is a bit of a stretch, but taking some notes shouldn’t be impossible.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:writing-effort" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:caf">
<p>This is pretty cool, too, because I’ve now spent 2 or 3 days without caffeine, which means the worst of the withdrawal headaches should be gone soon and I get a caffeine-addiction-reset.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:caf" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Wed, 08 Mar 2017 19:12:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/willpower/
http://ninoan.com/willpower/Inconsolata LGC with oldstyle numerals<p>In my perennial quest to make everyone love oldstyle numerals, I decided to make a fork of one of my favorite programming fonts, <a href="https://github.com/samposm/Inconsolata-LGC">Inconsolata</a>, and give it oldstyle numerals.</p>
<figure>
<img src="/images/inconsolata-oldstyle-example.png" alt="The numbers 0 through 9 set in Inconsolata LGC using oldstyle numerals" />
<figcaption>This is what it looks like</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The font can be downloaded <a href="https://github.com/nino/Inconsolata-LGC">from GitHub</a>.</p>
<p>If I figure out how to properly use FontForge, I’ll also add <a href="https://github.com/tonsky/FiraCode">programming ligatures</a> at some point.</p>
Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:35:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/inconsolata-lgc-oldstyle/
http://ninoan.com/inconsolata-lgc-oldstyle/Focusing on the breath<p>During mindfulness meditation, you’re supposed to focus on your breath. If you encounter any stray thoughts, you’re instructed to notice them and let them pass by, always returning your focus to the breath. I often find it difficult to stay focused on my breath for an extended length of time; it’s easy to <em>start</em> focusing on the breath, but after a short while, I’ll notice I’ve drifted off to thinking about something completely different.</p>
<p>I recently realized that, since it’s easy to <em>shift</em> my focus instead of <em>holding</em> it, it is much easier to focus on one breath at a time. Then, when the breath is over, instead of trying to keep focused, I’d repeat the mental motion of shifting my focus to the breath – again, only for a single breath. This way, I’ve been able to stay focused on my breathing for many minutes without drifting off into other thoughts.</p>
<p>So, in general, this is good, but it also feels like cheating since I’m not actually <em>holding</em> the focus; instead I’m doing a new mental motion after every single breath, which might put me in a less calm state than I’d be in if I could just learn to stay focused. I’d be curious to hear from people who have more experience with meditation, whether this is a bad way of doing things.</p>
Tue, 15 Nov 2016 10:49:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/focusing-on-the-breath/
http://ninoan.com/focusing-on-the-breath/Four or five thoughts on scientific writing<p>A few days ago I handed in my bachelor’s thesis in physics and I had a few thoughts while writing it.
Some of these thoughts only apply to literature that features a lot of mathematical equations, but some apply to all academic writing, or all writing in general.</p>
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<ul id="markdown-toc">
<li><a href="#cite-before-you-write-is-difficult" id="markdown-toc-cite-before-you-write-is-difficult">“Cite before you write” is difficult</a></li>
<li><a href="#on-formal-tone" id="markdown-toc-on-formal-tone">On formal tone</a></li>
<li><a href="#nobody-ever-quotes-anything" id="markdown-toc-nobody-ever-quotes-anything">Nobody ever quotes anything</a></li>
<li><a href="#texmacs-is-better-than-latex-even-though-it-has-bugs" id="markdown-toc-texmacs-is-better-than-latex-even-though-it-has-bugs">TeXmacs is better than LaTeX (even though it has bugs)</a></li>
<li><a href="#putting-each-sentence-on-a-single-line-in-your-text-file-is-a-good-idea" id="markdown-toc-putting-each-sentence-on-a-single-line-in-your-text-file-is-a-good-idea">Putting each sentence on a single line in your text file is a good idea</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 id="cite-before-you-write-is-difficult">“Cite before you write” is difficult</h1>
<p>I have the impression that a common mistake for undergrads writing their first scientific paper is that they start writing and only insert citations later.
This takes a lot of time because they have to go through the whole text and remember where they read each argument they mention.
Additionally, it leads to worse quality citations because many students will get lazy and only insert citations until their supervisors stop complaining.</p>
<p>Like anyone who thinks they’re smart, I figured I wouldn’t make this mistake when I’m writing my bachelor’s thesis.
But there I was, multiple pages written, a rough outline of the entire document finished, and I still had approximately zero citations in the text.</p>
<p>This surprised me because, whenever I research a topic online and take notes about it for myself, I never fail to cite sources.
I gather links to sources, put them at the bottom of a markdown file, and write my notes around those links.</p>
<p>Why did I do it wrong in the context of my thesis?
The problem wasn’t that I didn’t <em>know</em> citing as I write would be a good idea – I’d explicitly planned to do it.
My best guess is that there was too much friction in the process.
In the markdown example, all I have to do is copy the link to the source, paste it into the document, and put some identifier for the link at the beginning of the line (e.g. <code class="highlighter-rouge">[example]: http://example.com "Optional title"</code>).
To get a proper citation into BibTeX, I have to find the paper on Google Scholar, click “Cite”, click “BibTeX”, copy the content of the entry, open the bibliography file, paste it in, change the identifier if it looks gross, go back to my document, and enter <code class="highlighter-rouge">\cite{identifier}</code>.
It’s no surprise that people get lazy if that’s what they have to do for each source.</p>
<p>A solution to this problem is using citation management applications.
There is, for example, <a href="https://www.zotero.org/">Zotero</a>, which can store all your papers in a handy library.
It even gives you a button for your browser to quickly add new references
without digging through cite-menus on Google Scholar.
Using such an app, you just add every paper you look at into your library and, from there, export your bibliography file.
Then you can copy or drag the citations from your Zotero library without having to think about the details.</p>
<p>I find it surprising that I hadn’t heard much or thought about them until a few weeks before my deadline.</p>
<h1 id="on-formal-tone">On formal tone</h1>
<p>I was surprised to see how much the tone of scientific papers differs from that of textbooks.
So far I’d only ever read textbooks, and a lot of why I was excited to write my bachelor’s thesis was that I liked the styles of some textbooks.
Authors like David Griffiths or David Halliday<sup id="fnref:davidwtf"><a href="#fn:davidwtf" class="footnote">1</a></sup> write in a way that is both whimsical and easy to understand.</p>
<p>Here are some fun examples:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Before leaving our review of the notion of temperature, we should dispel the popular misconception that high temperature necessarily means a lot of heat. People are usually amazed to learn that the electron temperature inside a fluorescent light bulb is about 20,000°K. “My, it doesn’t feel that hot!”<sup id="fnref:chen"><a href="#fn:chen" class="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>I would be delinquent if I failed to mention the archaic nomenclature for atomic states, because all chemists and most physicists use it (and the people who make up the Graduate Record Exam <em>love</em> this kind of thing).
For reasons known best to nineteenth century spectroscopists, $l=0$ is called <em>s</em> (“sharp”), $l=1$ is <em>p</em> (for “principal”), $l=2$ is <em>d</em> (“diffuse”), and $l=3$ is <em>f</em> (“fundamental”);
after that I guess they ran out of imagination, because now it continues alphabetically (<em>g</em>, <em>h</em>, <em>i</em>, but skip <em>j</em>—just to be utterly perverse, <em>k</em>, <em>l</em>, etc.).
The shells themselves are assigned equally arbitrary nicknames, starting (don’t ask me why) with <em>K</em>: The <em>K</em> shell is $n=1$, the <em>L</em> shell is $n=2$, <em>M</em> is $n=3$, and so on (at least they’re in alphabetical order).<sup id="fnref:griffithsquantum"><a href="#fn:griffithsquantum" class="footnote">3</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then I looked at articles and didn’t find a single joke in them!
In fact the more papers I read, the more it felt like I was reading an entirely new language.
Sentences are much longer than in non-academic writing.
Most authors avoid using contractions (e.g. “can’t”, “isn’t”).
Nobody puts any emotion into their writing, eliminating all traces of informality from the text.
To say something “ran out” as in the second example above would probably already be too informal.
It seems uncommon to add analogies to complicated explanations to make them intuitively easier to understand.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhorter_txtng_is_killing_language_jk?language=en" title="Txting is killing language. JK!!! – TED">TED talk</a>, linguist John McWhorter proposes that texting doesn’t harm teenagers’ writing skills because they subconsciously treat it like a form of speech rather than writing.
Since writing a text message doesn’t <em>feel</em> like composing an essay, using <em>lol</em> and <em>rofl</em> won’t destroy the child’s ability to spell.
I suspect that this compartmentalization of different means of communication is part of why formality is so important in academic writing:
“Normal” written language can be imprecise but still easy to understand, if the reader and writer have shared background knowledge.
Academic papers usually communicate complicated ideas where precision is important.
It’s not hard to imagine that funny metaphors can easily lead to misunderstandings.
So, while I don’t see how contractions would cause any problems on their own, the rule “be careful with funny metaphores” is harder to follow than “nothing even remotely informal ever”.
If following either rule will lead to a well-argued paper, the latter is more efficient.
Similarly, if it’s forbidden to write in terms of analogies, it’ll be easier not to be tempted to <em>think</em> in terms of bad analogies.</p>
<p>So simply writing in a way that feels very formal and fancy is a good way to make sure one’s writing stays precise without having to think about it too much.</p>
<p>But (1), on the other hand, “regular language” is a good tool for communication, too.
We’ve all been trained to speak and write from very early on, and if you’re forced to write an basically a different language, it can slow down your thoughts and make you less efficient.
Contractions aren’t “formal”, but they can make sentences more fluent and easy-to-parse.
And analogies can offer valuable support for complicated explanations to steer the reader’s mind in the right direction such that they have an easier time following the text.</p>
<!-- Compare the following two sentences:
> Example haha rofl -->
<p>But (2), using formal language is not a fool-proof way to make sure all of your thinking is precise.
I recently read a paper that contained the sentence,
“At the inner boundary there are basically two types of reasonable boundary conditions: …”
Saying words like “basically”, or “essentially”, or “reasonable” may sound fancy, but doesn’t actually explain anything.</p>
<p>But (3), using formal language can actually be harmful for clarity.
You know how saying “I did X” sounds informal?
A lot of the time, authors use “We did X” instead.
This strikes me as a weird custom for papers that only have one author,
but it’s still reasonably clear what the author means.
It gets problematic when they start using the passive voice to sound fancy.
<em>Using the passive voice is almost always a bad idea.</em>
The reader needs to know who does what.
“The stress tensor is given by …”
Is that the definition?
Does this follow from something?
Are we assuming this?
Using the passive voice is an easy way to accidentally leave out crucial information that the readers then have to figure out themselves.</p>
<h1 id="nobody-ever-quotes-anything">Nobody ever quotes anything</h1>
<p>I was wondering why there were so few quotations in the papers I read.
Searching the internet revealed arguments like the following:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unlike other styles of writing, scientific writing rarely includes direct quotations.
Why?</p>
<ul>
<li>Quotations usually detract from the point you want to communicate.</li>
<li>Quotations do not reflect original thinking.</li>
</ul>
<p>Inexperienced writers may be tempted to quote, especially when they don’t understand the content.
However, the writer who understands her subject can always find a way to paraphrase from a research article without losing the intended meaning – and paraphrasing shows that the writer knows what she is talking about.<sup id="fnref:quotes"><a href="#fn:quotes" class="footnote">4</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I get that you want to make sure the author understands the concepts they’re writing about and didn’t just copy–paste stuff from other papers without having read them first.
But even so, it strikes me as wildly inefficient for them to paraphrase the same thoughts over and over in every paper they write on the same topic.
You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve read about the viscosity prescription being the big unsolved problem of accretion disc physics.</p>
<p>If you’re literally repeating what someone else already said, there is not much value in trying to come up with a new way to phrase it, unless you have a great new explanation.
If everyone just quoted one really good explanation, they wouldn’t have to waste their time rewriting the same information and could instead spend their time doing more research.</p>
<p>Next, if you paraphrase everything you read in a paper and then just say, “see &lt;Some paper&gt;”, it can be hard for the reader to find the exact spot you’re referencing.
Also, the reader has to have a copy of each paper you’re citing on hand, and find the statement you’re paraphrasing to check whether you <em>actually</em> understood the source material correctly.
This is not optimal.
On the web, this can be easily solved by putting a quotation of the relevant section, plus a reference to the original article, into a footnote.
Then the reader can immediately see the sentence/paragraph what you’re referring to without having to seek out the source article.
I can imagine the reason that this hasn’t caught on yet is that it doesn’t work well on paper.
If you only have a limited amount of space, you don’t want to dilute your own text with foreign material – and, contrary to the web, footnotes must always take up physical space on the page.</p>
<p>But yeah, I’m always happy when I look at how <a href="http://www.gwern.net/">Gwern</a> cites sources using enormous footnotes.</p>
<h1 id="texmacs-is-better-than-latex-even-though-it-has-bugs">TeXmacs is better than LaTeX (even though it has bugs)</h1>
<p><a href="http://texmacs.org">TeXmacs</a> is a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG" title="Wikipedia: WYSIWYG">WYSIWYG</a> text editor that makes it easy to write sort of LaTeX-looking documents without the hassle of having to look at the source code and output files separately.
What sets TeXmacs apart from other word processors is that you still get a lot of the benefits you expect from plain text editors.
For example, one thing I like about writing in markdown is that I can see formatting control characters, like * for denoting the start and end of italics.
Most WYSIWYG editors only show you the currently selected formatting options in a toolbar somewhere, which leads to the classic “Write an italicized word, write a normal word, delete the normal word, retype the normal word, <em>argh</em> now the new word is italicized too”-problem.
In TeXmacs, when the cursor is in a region with formatting applied, it draws a little box around that region, so you can always tell what’s happening.
Typesetting formulas in TeXmacs is the most pleasant experience I have ever had in my entire life and I never want to go back to writing LaTeX equations.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, when I started writing, I discovered bugs that occasionally made TeXmacs freeze up and I had to restart it.
It seemed relatively dangerous to make myself dependent on a program that sometimes freezes, but, in retrospect, I should’ve stuck with it.
I switched to LaTeX and it felt like placing individual atoms of ink on the paper.
This decision probably cost me a lot of time and writing quality, since I had less time for editing.</p>
<p>I tried talking to people at my university about TeXmacs and most of them said, “I’m pretty happy with LaTeX,” or, “I’m pretty fast at typing LaTeX,” but once you see how fast you can really be, you will not want to go back.</p>
<p>My hope is that if many people use TeXmacs, it’ll get more code contributions and become less buggy, because that’s supposedly how open-source works.</p>
<h1 id="putting-each-sentence-on-a-single-line-in-your-text-file-is-a-good-idea">Putting each sentence on a single line in your text file is a good idea</h1>
<p>Say you use LaTeX for your writing anyway, or you write in markdown.
There are two common ways to write plain-text documents:</p>
<ol>
<li>
<p><em>One line per paragraph</em>.
Each paragraph is contained in a single “line” of text, followed by an empty line.
Most text editors wrap lines dynamically, such that these one-line paragraphs just look like normal paragraphs.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><em>Hard wrapped lines</em>.
Some people like to use old text editors like Vim.
Vim isn’t very good at handling long lines that have to be displayed on multiple lines on the screen.
So, instead of putting an entire paragraph into a single line, Vim users configure their text editor to insert line breaks after, e.g., 80 characters.
This makes the files nice to look at in old text editors, but it makes editing more complicated:
Whenever you change something at the beginning of a paragraph, the line breaks in the rest of the paragraph may no longer be in appropriate places, so you have to reformat the entire paragraph.</p>
</li>
</ol>
<p>After switching to LaTeX, I wanted to try a technique I <a href="http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2012/one-sentence-per-line/">read about</a> a few years back:
Inserting a hard line break after each sentence or sub-clause.
This sounds like a strange idea because it makes the right edge of your text look all jaggedy, but it is actually really useful.</p>
<p>LaTeX and markdown ignore single line breaks in the text, so the output you create is going to look the same as when you use methods 1 or 2.
But if you place line breaks after periods, or important commas, it suddenly becomes much easier to delete, edit, and re-order individual sentences.
Another nice feature is that you can easily see when you’re accidentally starting each sentence with the same words.
<em>And</em> your version control system is going to love keeping track of your writing because version control systems natively operate on lines and not sentences.
<em>And</em> you can now see how long your sentences are, because they’re visually separated from each other.
This can help prevent the common problem where scientists write extremely long sentences.</p>
<p>Note that I’m only recommending putting line breaks in the source documents.
Don’t put line breaks in published texts.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:davidwtf">
<p>Every author of good textbooks is called David. It’s true.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:davidwtf" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:chen">
<p>Chen, Francis F. 1974. <a href="http://www.springer.com/us/book/9781441932013"><em>Introduction to Plasma Physics</em></a>. Springer, New York.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:chen" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:griffithsquantum">
<p>Griffiths, David J. 2004. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Quantum-Mechanics-David-Griffiths/dp/0131118927"><em>Introduction to Quantum Mechanics</em></a>. 2nd edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:griffithsquantum" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:quotes">
<p>The University of Washington <a href="http://www.psych.uw.edu/psych.php?p=339">Psychology Writing Center</a> on <a href="https://depts.washington.edu/psych/files/writing_center/quotes.pdf">using quotes in scientific writing</a>.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:quotes" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Thu, 18 Aug 2016 14:16:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/scientific-writing/
http://ninoan.com/scientific-writing/∞/3: Epilog · Abstraction<p><small>[<em>When I gave a draft of <a href="http://ninoan.com/notation/">part 3</a> to a friend to read, they commented on the first paragraph, “Math isn’t about giving things <em>funny</em> names; it’s about giving things meaningless names!” I had a thought on this topic but when I wrote part 3, but I couldn’t really make it fit and thought it wasn’t that interesting anyway, but my friend said it was, so here goes.</em> (<em>Parts <a href="http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are/">1</a>, <a href="http://ninoan.com/models/">2</a>, <a href="http://ninoan.com/notation/">3</a>.</em>)]</small></p>
<p>15-year old Nino had an idea once: “Math is stupid! When solving physics problems, you always have to take the actual physical quantities, then make up weird letters to put them through the equations, and then you have to translate them <em>back</em> to the physical quantities. This makes it harder to see what you’re doing because, when you glance at an equation, you only see the relations between letters and not the relationships between the actual physical quantities. In the hundreds of years that science has been around, <em>someone</em> must’ve come up with a more intuitive way to write equations. After all, computer scientists don’t just call their variables <code class="highlighter-rouge">a</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">b</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">c</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">x</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">y</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">z</code> either!”</p>
<!--more-->
<p>However, the meaningless symbols are actually a good thing. As I said <a href="http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are/">earlier</a>, the scientist’s job is coming up with mathematical constructs that mirror the behavior of certain aspects of reality. They use this mathematical model to look for new unexpected behaviors and run experiments to check whether these behaviors can be observed in reality. Now, since many things in the universe kinda look the same if you squint a little, it makes sense to apply the same models to them. Thus, you can solve the complicated math parts of your model once, while getting new predictions for many different experiments. For example, you only have to solve the equations for the harmonic oscillator once to model everything that sort of vibrates a little.</p>
<p>Or, you write an object’s kinetic energy as <span>$E_k=m v^2/2$</span>, and its rotation energy as <span>$E_r = I \omega^2/2$</span>. In both cases, you have half of some property the object has (the mass $m$ or the moment of inertia $I$), multiplied by the square of what the object is doing (How fast the object is moving $v$, or how fast it’s spinning $\omega$). So when you want to, e.g., form the time derivative of $E_k$ or $E_r$, it still has the same form ($\dot E_k = m v \dot v$ and $\dot E_r = I \omega \dot\omega$) and you can easily see that you don’t have to do the calculation twice. Thinking about formulas in this way can also help with memorization: If you take the rule, “Energy is always<sup id="fnref:always"><a href="#fn:always" class="footnote">1</a></sup> half of a property times the square of something that changes,” what do you think the energy stored in a capacitor looks like? If you’re a person who frequently finds themselves in situations where they have to answer such questions, you may remember that the Very Important Property of a capacitor is the capacitance $C$, and a thing that changes is its voltage $V$. This suggests the stored energy would be $E_c = C V^2/2$ which, in fact, is correct.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:always">
<p>I mean, obviously not <em>always</em>, but when you need an answer quickly, it’s better to have a heuristic than to say nothing at all.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:always" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Sun, 26 Jun 2016 11:16:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/abstraction/
http://ninoan.com/abstraction/3/3: Mathematical notation<p><small>[<em>Part 3 is about communicating mathematical ideas. <a href="http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are/">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://ninoan.com/models/">Part 2</a>. I took care to contain the tedious math bits in single paragraphs, so the point is still clear if you choose to only read the fun parts.<sup id="fnref:meta"><a href="#fn:meta" class="footnote">1</a></sup></em>]</small></p>
<p><em>summary.</em> There is no such thing as “wrong” notation. All that counts is that you get the math right and communicate your ideas clearly.</p>
<hr />
<p>Last time I <a href="http://ninoan.com/models/">explained</a> how it’s not accurate to say that an electron “is” a wave function, because an electron is a thing in the universe and a wave function is a mathematical object, and mathematical objects don’t live in the real universe. When people talk about wave functions, they often use the letter $\psi$. Obviously, even though it looks all nice and wavy, the $\psi$ itself isn’t the wave function either – it’s just its name. The concept of names is one we know and love from the real world: When I point at a chair and say, “This is Bob,” it’ll be clear what I mean when I explain that Bob has three legs. While it’s a terrible idea to call a chair Bob, giving things and their relationships with each other funny names is basically what mathematics is all about.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Just like we grew up believing that dictionaries had authority over the reality of words, school taught us that $+$ means you add two numbers, $-$ means you subtract them, $\times$ means you times them, and so on. But these symbols weren’t handed down from the heavens to the first humans to walk the Earth. There was a time when they didn’t exist, and then someone <em>made them up</em>. Now, $+, -, /, \times$ are pretty basic and sometimes you may even have a use for them in every day life, so these symbols are generally assumed to refer to their corresponding arithmetic operation. There are a handful of other symbols that are pretty unambiguous in their meaning, like $\sqrt{\cdot}$ or $=$, but beyond this lies madness.</p>
<h1 id="madness-1-when-wrong-is-right-and-right-is-complicated">madness 1: when wrong is right and right is complicated</h1>
<p>The slope of a function graph is called the function’s derivative. (If you’re familiar with, like, math, this may be known to you.) When your function is a straight line, you get the slope by dividing the difference between two function values by the difference of their arguments. When we write the differences as $\Delta f$ and $\Delta x$, the derivative can be written as $f’ = \Delta f / \Delta x$. Here, both $\Delta f$ and $\Delta x$ are real numbers. When you have an arbitrary curve instead of a straight line, you can approximate the slope by choosing $\Delta f$ and $\Delta x$ very small. The smaller you make them, the more accurate the result will be. Want infinite accuracy? Make them infinitely small. To make it clear that you’re working with infinitely small numbers (“infinitesimals”), you call them $\d f$ and $\d x$, which gives you $f’=\d f/\d x$. Yay!</p>
<p>But … what are $\d f$ and $\d x$? Both are infinitely small, right? So if you try to calculate $\d f$, you get $0$. And if you try to calculate $\d x$, you get $0$, too. If you took any other value for them, they’d no longer be infinitely small, and thus you’d get an inaccurate result. Thus, if $\d f/\d x$ were a normal fraction like $\Delta f/\Delta x$, it would be equal to $0/0$, and we all know never to divide by zero. Hence, since $\d f/\d x$ <em>does have</em> a value, it must be something else entirely. Remember <a href="http://ninoan.com/models/">part 2</a>, where I wrote,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If Newtonian mechanics is wrong, why do we still use it so damn much?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In that post, I explained that Newtonian mechanics often gives us the best prediction we can make, and using a “more correct” model would not give us a better result. Maybe this situation is similar: what do we get if we <em>pretend</em> $\d f$ and $\d x$ are numbers, and that we just don’t know their values?</p>
<p><em>example 1.</em> Say you’re told to solve the equation $f(x) \cdot f’(x) = x^2$. This may look daunting at first, but when you write the derivative as $\d f/\d x$ instead of $f’$, you get</p>
<script type="math/tex; mode=display">f(x) \cdot \dd{f}{x} = x^2\,.</script>
<p>and multiplying each side by $dx$ gives you $f(x)\,df=x^2\,dx$. This looks like integrals without the integral signs, so let’s put some on both sides:</p>
<script type="math/tex; mode=display">\int f(x)\,df = \int x^2\,dx\,.</script>
<p>Now we have $f^2 /2 = x^3 / 3$, so $f(x)=\sqrt{2/3} x^{3/2}$, and from this you can calculate the derivative $f’(x) = \sqrt{2/3} (3/2) \sqrt x$. Popping this back into our initial equation, we get $\sqrt{2/3}\cdot \sqrt{2/3}\cdot (3/2) \cdot x^{3/2 + 1/2} = x^2$. The roots of $(2/3)$ combine to a full $(2/3)$, which then cancels with $(3/2)$, and you’re left with $x^2=x^2$, which tells you that your solution is correct. <em>/example 1.</em></p>
<figure class="half">
<img src="/images/owls-shoes.jpg" alt="Owls sitting in shoes" />
<figcaption>As a reward for getting through the last paragraph, here's a picture of plush owls sitting in shoes. Inhale. Exhale.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In other words, we used a “mathematically” “wrong” approach to correctly solve a problem. In many situations, this is even a good idea. As long as you can <a href="https://4gravitons.wordpress.com/2016/01/22/trust-your-notation-as-far-as-you-can-prove-it/" title="4 gravitons: Trust your notation as far as you can prove it">prove that what you’re doing works</a>, using symbols that look less mathematically rigorous but lead you to the solution more intuitively can save a lot of time and even help prevent mistakes.</p>
<p>The cool thing about this is: Many people have already realized this, which is exactly the reason we have $f’(x)=\d f/\d x$ and $\mathrm{curl}\,\vec v = \nabla\times\vec v$ and so on, which means you can often be pretty wishy-washy about your notation and still end up making fewer mistakes.</p>
<h1 id="madness-2-when-math-isnt-all-clear-and-unambiguous">madness 2: when math isn’t all clear and unambiguous</h1>
<p>Mathematics is known for being clear and unambiguous. And yes, we can definitively<sup id="fnref:uncertain"><a href="#fn:uncertain" class="footnote">2</a></sup> prove that a theorem is either true or false, in contrast to the sciences where we only have falsifiable hypotheses and probabilities. But the <em>language</em> of math is just as bad as the language of language. Languages take shortcuts, sacrificing semantic clarity for the sake of data transmission rates. This is okay because most of the time everyone knows what you’re talking about.<sup id="fnref:except"><a href="#fn:except" class="footnote">3</a></sup> They tell you that mathematics doesn’t work that way, but I’m going to make the case that it does.</p>
<p>You know how you do your particle physics homework, and you use the symbol $m_e$, and the only thing that symbol has ever stood for was the mass of an electron, and your teacher tries to make this elaborate argument about the importance of declaring your variables but somehow they completely miss that you never told anyone what $\pi$ means or what $e$ means or what $\log$ means, and so on? But then the cutoff point between what you need to define and what’s “obvious” isn’t really clear, and it becomes this huge frustrating mess? That’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. Or you say, “Let $p$ be the momentum operator,” and your professor complains that $p$ can’t be an operator because operators always need to have a hat, like $\hat p$, and you say, no, you defined $p$ to be the operator and shut up you’re being ridiculous, but the professor insists and you end up having to draw a little hat on <em>every single</em> instance of the letter $p$ in your equations even though leaving it out would give you 100% the correct result and cause zero confusion.</p>
<p><em>example 3.</em> You have a function $f(x,t)$ you want to integrate over $x$.<sup id="fnref:sorry"><a href="#fn:sorry" class="footnote">4</a></sup> You’ll write something like <span>$\int_a^b f(x,t)\,dx=[F(x,t)]_a^b$</span>, right? And here it’s totally not clear if the brackets are to be evaluated with $x$ as $a$ and $b$ or $t$ as $a$ and $b$. You <em>know</em>, from looking to the left of the equals-sign, but it isn’t clear just by looking at the right half of the equation. Likewise, some authors write volume integrals as <span>$\int_V f(\vec r_1, \vec r_2)\,d\tau$</span>, where it’s unclear whether they’re integrating over <span>$\vec r_1$ or $\vec r_2$</span>. They fix this problem by putting explanations in the text and following conventions throughout the book so it’s clear from context what they mean. <em>/example 3.</em></p>
<p><em>example 4.</em> Or, instead of integrals, let’s talk about derivatives. When you have a bunch of equations with many partial derivatives, it can be frustrating to write $\partial V_x/\partial x, \partial V_y/\partial x, \partial V_x/\partial y$, and so on, over and over. This is because you’re told that the components of a vector field $\vec V$ must always be written as $(V_x,V_y,V_z)$. But since all these letters are only names, you can simply rename the components. For example, you could call the vector field $\vec V = (X,Y,Z)$. This already saves you the work of writing a subscript every time you reference one of the components of $\vec V$. But as an added bonus, you can now use the subscripts for other purposes, like partial derivatives. Thus, you can define $\partial V_x/\partial x$ as $X_x$, $\partial V_y/\partial x$ as $Y_x$, and so on. This is much shorter and way more fun! I tried that once and my TA was hopelessly confused because they didn’t understand that indices on vectors don’t <em>have to</em> mean selecting the corresponding component, even though I explicitly defined what everything means at the top of the page. <em>/example 4.</em></p>
<p>Context matters when writing down equations. Everything doesn’t have to be clear in isolation, as long as you explain what’s happening. Obviously this doesn’t mean that you can just write literally anything because then it wouldn’t be clear anymore what you mean. But what you <em>can</em> do is invent new notation and use that if it makes sense. Note, however, that making up your own things isn’t always a good idea: there already exists a large set of shared expectations about what many symbols do and, often, it makes sense to go with established conventions. Like if you’re using other people’s equations, you shouldn’t just exchange all the letters for no good reason, even if you feel like $\xi$ is a much nicer letter than $\lambda$.</p>
<p>In conclusion: Be free, be spontaneous, be brave – give your equations meaning instead of useless hats and subscripts. Sometimes, you really don’t have to repeat yourself.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:meta">
<p>In the future, when I have a list of my most notable essays, this one will be “The Long, Confusing, Meandering One.” This is my <em>A Feast For Crows</em> in terms of exciting action; it’s my <em>American Gods</em> in terms of quickly getting to the point; it’s my <em>Getting Things Done</em> in terms of elegant phrasing – you get the idea. Think of this more as a piece of performance art, rather than an informative article.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:meta" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:uncertain">
<p>If you ignore <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/3be/confidence_levels_inside_and_outside_an_argument/">external uncertainties</a>.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:uncertain" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:except">
<p>Except when you’re writing a 2000 word essay on how to use mathematical notation without an outline. What was this guy thinking?&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:except" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:sorry">
<p>I’m so sorry about all the integrals. And all the footnotes.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:sorry" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Mon, 13 Jun 2016 16:33:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/notation/
http://ninoan.com/notation/2/3: Models<!--<small>\[_Part 2 is a complaint about people who may or may not understand how science works._\]</small>-->
<p><small>[<em>Part 2 is the best part. <a href="http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are" title="1/3: Just The Way Things Are | ❀✿❀ SuperLaserNino ✿❀✿">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://ninoan.com/notation/" title="3/3: Mathematical notation | ❀✿❀ SuperLaserNino ✿❀✿">part 3</a>.</em>]</small></p>
<p>In science, we try to understand the world by building models and theories that describe it. You see an apple falling on your head, think, “oh, maybe that’s how the planets move, too”, and you write down rules that allow for the motion of planets and don’t allow for some phenomena you do not see, like things falling upward. You call the collection of those rules your model, or theory. When you have your model, you perform more experiments to test it, and every time your model’s prediction roughly matches your observations, you get more confident that your model is correct.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>What does it mean for a model to be correct? This is where the trouble starts. In school we learn that classical mechanics is a pretty good approximation of reality, but quantum mechanics and relativity is the <em>correct</em> theory of how the universe works.<sup id="fnref:qmrel"><a href="#fn:qmrel" class="footnote">1</a></sup> This framing has always bothered me: If Newtonian mechanics is wrong, why do we still use it so damn much?</p>
<p>Say you throw your keys out the window, and you want to calculate the path they will take to the ground as exactly as possible. So you get out your pencil and notebook and you start scribbling. Should you do your calculations relativistically? It would be more work, but you want to be really exact, so you add a bunch of γ’s everywhere and do your calculations relativistically. Then you notice that you’ve been assuming a flat earth the whole time. Oh no! All right – the earth’s a sphere, right? Let’s use that and we get an ellipse instead of a parabola for the flight path of our keychain. So – is the result more accurate than the classical, flat-earth one? Certainly not a lot more, but maybe a little? Nope. Not one bit. Why? Because the difference the air resistance makes, and the uncertainty of the direction you’re throwing in is much bigger than the difference a relativistic calculation could make.</p>
<p>This still doesn’t mean that objects in our everyday lives have a different nature than single electrons or supermassive black holes. It just means that, if you put enough electrons and protons and stuff together, and you don’t make them too dense or too fast, you can predict what they’re going to do by using the model of classical mechanics.</p>
<p>Many physics students, when they’re starting out, seem to feel like they’ve been promised something. That they’ll be led behind the curtains of reality and shown how the world <em>really</em> works. They seem to accept Newtonian mechanics – it works, after all. Medium sized objects, apparently, are Newtonian in nature. But it doesn’t take long for the disappointments to start. “Ideal gases don’t exist in nature, but it’s a simple model that works relatively well for lots of stuff,” they tell us. We’re not happy, but we’ll take the approximation, for now. We’re relieved when they teach us the “real gas” models, like Van der Waals gases. Then it gets worse again: “Ideal fluids are a pretty absurd approximation. There are no ideal fluids in the real world, and for most fluids, you don’t even get very good results using this model. But it’s simple, and it teaches the principles that you need to understand to work with better fluid models later.” We’re not taught the more complicated fluid models in that semester, and it leaves us with a quasy feeling. <em>Why are we being taught a rough approximation instead of the correct model?</em></p>
<p>After a few semesters, the students get herded into a lab, to perform their first experiments themselves. Their belief is already shaken by countless lectures only teaching rough approximations instead of the real thing. But this is worse. Here, they finally see how the sausage is made. “All of physics is just estimations and approximations!” they exclaim. “Nothing here is exact!” It slowly sinks in that <em>this</em> is not just a rough approximation of what physicists do. Physics really is just approximations. Dutifully, the students draw error bars in their hand-crafted plots of noisy data, and wheep.</p>
<p>What’s important is that this isn’t a bad thing, and especially not a preventable thing. The approximations aren’t the result of laziness. The small inaccuracies in every scientific theory are the result of countless hours of patient, skillful labor. It’s awesome that we can make very accurate predictions about the behavior of gases just using <em>pV</em>=<em>NT</em>, instead of calculating the exact position and momentum of every elementary particle in our system. Because, by the way, that “system” is the entire universe. It’s super cool that we can just pretend planets are single points in space, with a mass and no size, only feeling the gravity of the sun and not each other’s, and <em>still</em> predict their orbits with great accuracy. Planets aren’t spheres, their orbits aren’t circles, Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion aren’t woven in the fabric of the universe, and yet, pretending all this is true will <em>get us to Mars</em>.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity. — <a href="https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_E._P._Box" title="Wikipedia: George E. P. Box">George E. P. Box</a></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The goal here is not “understanding”. The goal is making good predictions. I see my fellow students understanding that ideal gases don’t exist in nature, but I don’t see them make the jump to “Van der Waals Gases don’t exist any more than ideal ones do”. I don’t see them understanding that “quantum wave functions” are a mathematical function instead of a thing, out there in the universe. The problem is that physics ventures so deep into the hidden parts of reality, that it’s no longer intuitively clear that there is a distinction between the map and the territory. They tell you about the paradox of the double slit experiment and you conclude, “electrons aren’t just particles”. They show you Schrödinger’s equation and solve it to get the wave function. “That explains it!” you think, and you conclude that electrons <em>are</em> wave functions.</p>
<p>But <a href="http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=3805" title="Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal">the universe</a> does not <a href="http://hpmor.com/chapter/64" title="Scroll all the way down to the last story.">run on math</a>. The reason the universe looks so much like it’s made of math when you apply science to it is because math is <em>really really versatile.</em> But this doesn’t mean our Laws of Physics are <a href="http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are" title="1/3: Just The Way Things Are | ❀✿❀ SuperLaserNino ✿❀✿">more than</a> summaries of our observations. It’s not the universe that is good at being modeled by math – it’s the math that is good at modeling <em>anything</em>, be it our universe or universes with <a href="https://4gravitons.wordpress.com/2012/11/26/why-i-study-a-theory-that-isnt-true/" title="Why I Study a Theory That Isn’t “True”">different rules</a>.</p>
<p>I’ve heard someone say, after reading a mechanics textbook, that they finally understand why perpetual motion is impossible. It’s because something something holonomic constraints can’t do any work because something dot product. This can’t possibly be true because that’s not the order in which things happened. First the perpetual motion machine didn’t work, then the theory was written and it was written in such a way that perpetual motion machines don’t work, and that’s why something something holonomic constraints forbids them. If the textbook had explained, in detail, why perpetual motion machines <em>do</em> work, that wouldn’t have made it true.</p>
<p>We once had a homework exercise where we were supposed to say why a particle behaved in a certain way. The obviously “correct” answer – the <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/iq/guessing_the_teachers_password/" title="Guessing the Teacher's Password - LessWrong">teacher’s password</a> – was “because of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle”. But the Uncertainty Principle just follows from Schrödinger’s equation, and we’re using that to solve all our quantum mechanics problems. So by that logic, basically everything happens because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. That can’t be right.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>For example, when a pen falls off a desk, that seems to be proof that gravity exists, because gravity made it fall. But what is “gravity”? In 1500, “gravity” was the pen’s desire to go to the center of the earth; in 1700 “gravity” was a force that acted at a distance according to mathematical laws; in the 1900s “gravity” was an effect of curved space-time; and today physicists theorize that “gravity” may be a force carried by subatomic particles called “gravitons”. Gendlin views “gravity” as a concept and points out that concepts can’t make anything fall. Instead of saying that gravity causes things to fall, it would be more accurate to say that things falling cause [the different concepts of] gravity. Interaction with the world is prior to concepts about the world. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Gendlin#Philosophy" title="Wikipedia: Eugene Gendlin">source</a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s not the laws we have written down that tell reality what to do. It’s reality that tells us what laws to write. Writing down the law will not make reality obey it. But reality doing something unexpected will make <em>us</em> write a new law.</p>
<p>The point I’m trying to make here is, when you have electrodynamics homework to do, and taking a few shortcuts by pretending stuff doesn’t interact as much as the theory says will allow you to finish in 6 pages instead of 47, maybe you should do that. Because there is no “correct” model. You’ll never know what matter is “really” made of. All you can ask for is a good prediction.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:qmrel">
<p>Y’know, disregarding the fact that we still haven’t found a way to combine the two to make black holes work.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:qmrel" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Sat, 30 Jan 2016 16:33:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/models/
http://ninoan.com/models/Victory!<p>People tell me I should go to a CFAR workshop and they may well be right, so it’s time to figure out how to prevent what is inevitably going to happen there from happening.</p>
<!--more-->
<blockquote>
<p>each of the workshop’s sessions invariably finished with participants chanting, ‘‘3-2-1 Victory!’’ — a ritual I assumed would quickly turn halfhearted. Instead, as the weekend progressed, it was performed with increasing enthusiasm. By the time CoZE rolled around, late on the second day, the group was nearly vibrating. When Smith gave the cue, everyone cheered wildly, some ecstatically thrusting both fists in the air. (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/the-happiness-code.html?_r=0" title="The Happiness Code, Article in the NYT Magazine">source</a>)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Group enthusiasm is not for me. I’ve been to the <a href="http://ninoan.com/lwcw2015">LessWrong Community Weekend</a>, and I’ve been to <a href="http://eaglobal.org">EA Global</a>, and each time, everyone was excited and there was always the stupid cheer at the end. I do like that this is a thing – enthusiasm is good! Group cheers increase the feeling of togetherness and community. I don’t want to suggest dropping this custom. Yet, every time I’m part of this custom, I cringe and I can’t cheer or shout or wave my fists around and, instead, I start feeling anxious, sad, and <em>not</em> part of the group. And if I’m not <em>really</em> careful, I always end up in a sadness/depression spiral. I want to change that.</p>
<p>I was wondering why exactly it is that I get anxious and sad when the people around me are extremely happy. This seems contradictory. When people around me are sad, I get sad; when people around me are happy – but within reason – I get happy. It’s only when we get into the extremely happy territory that my happiness drops. So it looks like this:</p>
<p><img src="/images/happiness-actual.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>when it should look like this:</p>
<p><img src="/images/happiness-ideal.png" alt="" /></p>
<p>Let’s isolate the problem:</p>
<ul>
<li>I can be around small groups of extremely excited, happy, loud people and enjoy myself. I’ll laugh and feel part of the group, but I won’t participate in being loud and visibly enthusiastic.</li>
<li>At the Community Weekend, where were situations where I was feeling sad and anxious, and this feeling was made worse when we were gathered as a big group, and people calmly explained how happy they were about the event. I did not feel part of the group.</li>
<li>At the end of the first meeting of my productivity-/accountability-group, it was decided that we would do a group cheer at the end. It was a group of roughly five people and I had felt very integrated into the group up until that point. When it was time for the group cheer, I felt like an outsider and got anxious and experienced a sadness spiral for the rest of the night.</li>
<li>I was once at a concert I liked. At concerts, everyone shouts along with the band (this was a metal concert). I tried – and I couldn’t. I knew nobody would really hear me, or pay much attention to me. It was really loud. But still, I was completely unable to shout, and it wasn’t a physiological problem – the issue was in my head.</li>
<li>Relatedly: I would never even dream of screaming on a roller coaster. Not just because I couldn’t, but because it never even occurred to me to do that. I was always confused why people screamed – were they afraid? Didn’t they know roller coasters are safe? I’m not a person who screams.</li>
<li>In my life, there have been approximately three times where I got so angry that I actually did shout at someone.</li>
<li>Sometimes I get stressed out (mostly because of homework) and want to scream in frustration. Even if I’m the only person in the building, I can’t, and when I try, I feel trapped, because I can’t find a release for my emotions.</li>
<li>I’ve tried acting in the past, and I experienced the same mental block whenever I tried to play a role that wasn’t me.</li>
</ul>
<p>The interpretation of this that currently feels most right to me has two parts. One, being loud, excited, enthusiastic, isn’t <em>me</em>, therefore, trying to pretend that I am these things feels inauthentic and wrong. Two, not being able to participate in group behavior when (a) it is expected, and (b) I want to, makes me feel excluded. So the feeling is, <em>group cheers is not something Nino does; group cheers are something members of this group do; therefore, I do not belong to this group</em>.</p>
<p>I remember different situations where I deliberately played a specific role in order to nudge my identity in a certain direction. For example, before I started my TA job, I was Not A Person Whose Job Involves Leading A Group Of People. Deciding to change that was uncomfortable and anxiety-inducing. A person who could do a job like that was not who I was, but it was who I wanted to be. So I forced myself into the role and, knowing that I would be easier not to do this alone, I had someone sit beside me as I sent out the email asking for the job. Once I’d done that, I’d become a person who can, at least, ask for such a job. Once I’d experienced doing a thing a person like that would do, actually showing up to sign the contract and then going to the classes was much easier because I could just let subconscious consistency effects play out. “Well, I did ask for this job. If I’m the kind of person who asks for a job like this, that must be because I think I can do it, and <em>that</em> must be because I probably actually can do this.”</p>
<p>I didn’t used to be the kind of person who enjoys dancing badly at parties. I’m still not 100% comfortable doing it, but ever since I put myself in a situation where I was forced to participate and was in a good mindset to accept that I was actually doing it instead of “I’m forcing myself to do something that is not Something I Do,” dancing has become much easier for me – so much that it can even be enjoyable.</p>
<p>So: I <a href="https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Alief" title="LessWrong Wiki: Alief">alieve</a> that I’m not a person who can shout, or cheer, or be loud and excited about things. Therefore, getting into situations where this behavior is expected of me, will make me anxious. Knowing that, the solution seems relatively simple. I need to practice shouting, and cheering, and being loud and excited about things. I need to do this as long as it takes to become less painful and aversive. For this to be successful, I need to be in an environment that feels safe to me. My best guess for what that environment would look like is: a group of 2, 3, at most 4 people, including me, in a place where no strangers can easily hear loud noises. Being inside a regular apartment with neighbors above and below would make this considerably harder. Doing this on my own won’t work because I can’t make all the noise myself. Turning on loud music or sounds from the internet won’t work because the sounds need to be human made. As I mentioned, concerts won’t work because I don’t feel safe enough around the other audience members. Open spaces, outside, far away from any buildings would work well because you could start out by standing far apart and shouting things at the other person. Since, in that case, shouting would be necessary to transfer information, it wouldn’t feel as aversive. From there, you could slowly move closer together while keeping the volume high.</p>
<p>Once I’m more comfortable with shouting, we could move on to loudly displaying enthusiasm by saying, “Yay!” and “Woo!” and “Yes!” and “Victory!” really loudly, and waving your fists around and whatever people do.</p>
<p>I predict that, if I do this a few times, group enthusiasm will be significantly more bearable for me in the future, which would make lots of social interactions easier; and <em>that</em> would be extremely useful for my life in general.</p>
<p>I also predict that I’ll feel really really silly doing all of this. (Even more silly than I felt writing it.)</p>
<p>(Comment or <a href="mailto:n.annighoefer@gmail.com">email</a> me if you want to be my shouting partner. This could be lots of fun.)</p>
Mon, 25 Jan 2016 20:11:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/victory/
http://ninoan.com/victory/1/3: Just The Way Things Are<p><small>[<em>Part 1 is about a feeling about the world. Epistemic state: Maybe I shouldn’t commit to writing blog posts about every thought that occurs to me while browsing Wikipedia. <a href="http://ninoan.com/models/" title="2/3: Models | ❀✿❀ SuperLaserNino ✿❀✿">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://ninoan.com/notation/" title="3/3: Mathematical notation | ❀✿❀ SuperLaserNino ✿❀✿">part 3</a>.</em>]</small></p>
<p>I decided I don’t like the term “laws of physics” to describe the way reality behaves. Calling them laws makes them sound optional<sup id="fnref:authority"><a href="#fn:authority" class="footnote">1</a></sup>. Like, it would be really good if you didn’t break them because they are being enforced by the space police, but if you’re <em>really clever</em>, you can outrun the space police and break them anyway. But you can’t.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>When you put two marbles down, and then you add two more, the fact that there are now four marbles isn’t a law you can break. It’s not something where some universal authority decides that this should happen by calculating 2+2. It’s just the way things are.</p>
<p>And so, when you hit the accelerator, there is nothing <em>deciding</em> to stop you from going past the speed of light. It’s just not going to happen. Look, for example, at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life" title="Wikipedia: Conway's Game of Life">Conway’s Game of Life</a>. Because of the way the game is structured, there is an absolute speed limit and there is nothing you can do to go <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light_(cellular_automaton)" title="There are phenomena that look like things are going FTL, but there's no information moving FTL.">faster than that maximum speed</a>. And still, if you program a simulation of the Game of Life, you don’t need to add a rule preventing things from exceeding the maximum speed. Like two marbles plus two marbles being four marbles, the speed limit is just a consequence of the structure of the universe.</p>
<p>But! For the people <em>in</em> the Game of Life, it won’t be that obvious, because they don’t see the game board. They see the contents of the cells, but not the cells themselves. So they might wonder why the speed limit exists and they might think they can somehow circumvent it. It’s only when you see the game board that you get an intuitive understanding about why these laws exist and why it’s not <em>forbidden</em> to break them, but a logical impossibility.</p>
<p>This transfers to the real world, too. There have been people who tried to build perpetual motion machines and made plans to go faster than the speed of light and theorized about superluminal neutrinos. Thinking about the laws of the universe as something that logically follows from the stuff the universe runs on, rather than the laws being rules that exist explicitly and are somehow enforced, makes impossible things feel more impossible – you won’t trick the universe into giving you energy by building a perpetual motion machine that is so complicated that the space police doesn’t notice you’re stealing energy.</p>
<p>I thought that was an interesting intuition.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:authority">
<p>Weellll, this is arguably <a href="http://sandymaguire.me/blog/authority-and-momentum" title="Authority and Momentum ← We Can Solve This">inaccurate</a>, but the point is less about the terminology and more about the intuition, so whatev.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:authority" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Mon, 28 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are/
http://ninoan.com/just-the-way-things-are/Waves of confidence<p>There seems to be a distinct and relatively predictable pattern to my confidence/comfort levels when I’m meeting new people and I’m wondering whether this is a common experience.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>Usually, before I get to know someone (except when they’re known for doing something really interesting), it’s hard to <a href="http://agentyduck.blogspot.de/2015/05/tortoise-report-3-empathy_16.html" title="Brienne Yudkowsky on building curiosity directed at another person.">build an interest</a> in them. Like, I can feel completely lonely and desperately want friends and still, when I think about who to talk to, just <em>everyone</em> new will seem like the dullest person in the world. So, if someone happens to talk to me, the stakes are low and I’m not anxious. After one or two conversations, I manage to internalize that I’m talking to an actual sentient being and I start becoming really excited about talking to them.</p>
<p>If it turns out they like me, and we stay in touch for a few days, there comes a point where my brain is like, “oh wow, this is turning into a thing. Are we friends now?” And then I notice I’ve told most of my backstory and I start running out of things to say. So I’m trying frantically to find things to say and it’s <em>just not working</em> and it’s like, “oh gods, do I have nothing interesting to say? How can I keep the other person from losing interest?” And I get anxiety attacks and the only thing that can help is them talking to me, but they don’t because they don’t have time to talk to me like <em>all day</em> which is what I’d need to feel safe, and I don’t know what to do.</p>
<p>Eventually – if contact doesn’t stop, that is – I realize it’s okay that I sometimes don’t have anything profound to say and I get into a groove of just speaking whenever I do have something to say. I feel more or less certain that the other person cares about me as a human being, and that I won’t mess that up by saying one wrong thing, so I manage to relax and I get less anxious.</p>
<p>But <em>then</em> I realize – wait, I’m much more confident now than I was in the beginning! Maybe they only liked the shy me, or they only liked me because they didn’t get the full picture because in the beginning I was all quiet and agreeable. So I get more anxious again, and I get quieter. But then I feel like I’m holding myself back and I’m boring because I never say anything so I still try to be confident and say things and be courageous and settle into kind of a back-and-forth of being more vocal vs being more agreeable.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/HDa7gNn.png" alt="" title="Look, I made a graph to make this post more interesting!" /></p>
<p>And after a while I get used to that and I feel better saying things. And eventually, after years and years and more sudden dips in my courage, the connection turns into a stable friendship and I don’t need to be so scared of sending them cute cat pictures anymore.</p>
<p>Does anyone else have a similar experience, or is it more common for confidence levels to rise linearly with time, or something else?</p>
Sun, 04 Oct 2015 18:10:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/waves/
http://ninoan.com/waves/German EA landing page<p>There is now a German translation of the <a href="http://effectivealtruism.org"><span class="sc">EA</span> landing page</a>. It lives at <a href="http://effektiver-altruismus.de">www.effektiver-altruismus.de</a>. Share it with all your German friends!</p>
Wed, 26 Aug 2015 09:25:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/german-ea-landing-page/
http://ninoan.com/german-ea-landing-page/LessWrong Community Weekend 2015<p><small>[<em>Kinda sappy and emotional in parts. Being posted sort of a long time after the event. Not totally happy with the way this post turned out, but, you know, better finished and mediocre than perfect and imaginary, or something. Epistemic state: I deleted a lot of “as far as I can tell”s. Just pretend like every sentence ends with those words, and please do tell me if I’m wrong about anything.</em>]</small></p>
<p>I attended this year’s European LessWrong Community Weekend. The initial draft of this post began thus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This is the event report I did not want to write and you do not want to read.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I decided I didn’t like this approach. During the Weekend, people always said, “make it your own.” So let’s do <em>that</em> instead.</p>
<p>This is a collection of things I learned while I was in Berlin.</p>
<!--more-->
<ul id="markdown-toc">
<li><a href="#noticing-gratitude" id="markdown-toc-noticing-gratitude">Noticing gratitude</a></li>
<li><a href="#create-opportunities-not-conversations" id="markdown-toc-create-opportunities-not-conversations">Create opportunities, not conversations</a></li>
<li><a href="#cuddling" id="markdown-toc-cuddling">Cuddling</a></li>
<li><a href="#blanket-forts-are-awesome" id="markdown-toc-blanket-forts-are-awesome">Blanket forts are awesome</a></li>
<li><a href="#people-know-i-exist" id="markdown-toc-people-know-i-exist">People <em>know I exist</em></a></li>
<li><a href="#purpose-authority-and-confidence" id="markdown-toc-purpose-authority-and-confidence">Purpose, authority, and confidence</a></li>
<li><a href="#you-can-meditate-lying-down" id="markdown-toc-you-can-meditate-lying-down">You can meditate lying down</a></li>
<li><a href="#conclusion" id="markdown-toc-conclusion">Conclusion</a></li>
</ul>
<h1 id="noticing-gratitude">Noticing gratitude</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>In the weeks leading up to the Weekend, I was really excited. This was going to be awesome. I would meet new people and have fun talking to them, and maybe even make a few friends. I thought, “I enjoy being in the Study Hall most of the time, how hard could meeting people in the real world possibly be?”</p>
<p>Quite hard, as it turns out. Being around so many people in the real world was completely overwhelming for me and I spent large chunks of the Weekend feeling anxious, depressed, and worthless. I <em>wanted</em> to talk to people, I wanted to socialize, I wanted to have a nice time, but the more I tried, the more I felt like I was failing. I thought I would quite possibly never be able to make any new friends because I was just no good at it.</p>
<p>That was how I felt on the way back from Berlin. But the fact was that everyone at the event had been incredibly friendly and welcoming and the only reason I felt like I hadn’t connected with anyone was because I was being all scared. I decided it would be incredibly unfair to the other participants to let sadness, self-loathing, and resignation be the bottom line I’d draw from this experience.</p>
<p>I needed a mindset-shift. I needed to get into a more positive reference frame. Partly inspired by Robert’s lightning talk on gratitude journaling, I began by making a list of everyone I remembered having a comfortable conversation with. It took me only a few minutes to gather about 20 names, which I thought was pretty good for an event with less than 80 people – especially considering I spent a lot of the time hiding from everyone.</p>
<p>As a result of this exercise, it became much easier to contemplate all the positive aspects of the Weekend and feel a lot better about having attended.</p>
<h1 id="create-opportunities-not-conversations">Create opportunities, not conversations</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>So the plan was to meet new people and form new relationships and socialize and all that business, right? Yeah. But there’s a problem: I don’t actually know how to do that. I know I try, and I know that <em>sometimes</em> I manage to have a good time talking to people. But – and I really should have noticed this earlier – I’m always <em>surprised</em> whenever I have an enjoyable social interaction. So I knew I wasn’t actually incapable of having nice conversations – because they’ve happened before – but I was clearly doing something wrong; somehow, my model of how successful social interactions work must be flawed. Ironically, I could never remember what I’d done when conversations did go well. Whenever I really made an effort and thought about what I was doing, things were awkward and uncomfortable. How would I ever make progress like that?</p>
<p>And it took me this long to notice it. Maybe that is not a coincidence. Maybe <em>trying</em> to socialize just won’t work because socializing <a href="/reaching-the-goal-is-not-an-action">is not an action</a> and “trying to socialize” actually does nothing but distract me from doing the actions that lead to everyone having a nice time. Assuming this is true, what <em>are</em> the actions I can perform?</p>
<p>Whenever I find someone interesting, I tend to assume they are somehow “objectively” interesting, so talking to them must be a bad idea because everyone is probably already talking to them all the time and I’ll just be an annoyance. Lesson One: This is not true. In most cases, your interest in someone is primarily a fact about <em>you</em>, and not the interesting person. If you don’t know how to start a conversation, just look for a group of interesting-looking people and <em>stand close to them</em>. What do you do then? You wait. Wait and <em>listen</em>. Don’t think about what to say. Trying to think of something to say is pretty much the last thing you ever want to do when you’re trying to have an interesting conversation (unless you have something specific you want to tell the other person, that is). Thinking about what you might say next will only distract you from listening to what the <em>other</em> person is saying.</p>
<p>So you wait, and you listen, and you try to get a feel for the situation. When you’re not desperately trying to “socialize” or “talk to people”, your brain won’t tell you you’re failing when you don’t say anything for a while. This will give you the time to get comfortable which, in turn, will tell your brain it’s okay to relax. And <em>that</em> is the point where you start talking, because once you feel relaxed and comfortable and you’re listening, you will inevitably find relevant things to say. (If you do find something to say earlier, you don’t need to hold back, of course. This is just supposed to help you think when you can’t.)</p>
<p>When I’m with a group of people I don’t know well, and the group moves from one place to another, I tend to get insecure and not know whether they still want me there, so I often quietly disappear. Lesson Two: The event is called “Community Weekend” for a reason. The others are there to talk to people, too. It will probably be fine to stay with a group and take part in their conversations even when they change locations. If you’re worried about being annoying, keep in mind that it is actually quite difficult to be so annoying that people will want you to go away. And if that doesn’t help, just have some faith that people will tell you to leave if they <em>really</em> don’t like you.</p>
<p>I have some ideas for one-on-one conversations with a specific person, but it’ll take a bit more practice until I can turn them into something useful.</p>
<h1 id="cuddling">Cuddling</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>Scott Alexander <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/27/cuddle-culture/">writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I go into social encounters viewing most people as a combination of scary and boring. I can sometimes overcome that most of the way by spending months getting to know them and appreciate their unique perspective. Or I can cuddle with them for ten minutes. Either one works.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ever since I read this, it has been part of my identity. Now I’m not so sure. I still think cuddling is awesome and it can calm me when I’m stressed out, but it did not really make me feel more comfortable around people I didn’t know and was scared of. Apparently, for me, to feel good about cuddles, I need some kind of relationship to be already present, or it will feel uncomfortable for me. Fortunately though, depending on the person, it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of contact to get to point where I feel comfortable cuddling someone. (I’m referring here to the stuff that’s been going on in the Blanket Fort. Regular everyday hugs work all the time with everyone, and I got quite a few of those at the Weekend for which I am very grateful.)</p>
<h1 id="blanket-forts-are-awesome">Blanket forts are awesome</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>Seriously, it’s like a blend between engineering and cuddles.</p>
<h1 id="people-know-i-exist">People <em>know I exist</em></h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>I once had a conversation with a friend from university. She is the person who (I assume) knows the names of (almost) every other physics student two semesters up and down at my university. To me, she said, “until well into the second semester, I didn’t even know you existed.” And the thing is: That did not surprise me. I’m not a very conspicuous person. Being mostly quiet and if not, uncontroversial, it’s understandable if people don’t notice me much.<sup id="fnref:pity"><a href="#fn:pity" class="footnote">1</a></sup></p>
<p>In the Study Hall, as far as I could tell, I’ve mostly been quiet, too, so I figured regulars of the Study Hall who were also attendants at the Community Weekend would be vaguely aware of my existence, but nothing more. It surprised me how much I felt like the other people from the Study Hall felt like they knew me. And then later in the Weekend, a few people even told me they liked talking to me and want to do more of that! Whaaat.</p>
<p>After thinking about this for a while, I concluded that this realization can be generalized to “people seem to feel more connected to other people (including me) than I feel to them”. Knowing that my perception of closeness is apparently different from most other people’s is useful, because (a) now I have something more specific to work on (I can probably worry less about <em>making people</em> like me and spend more time building trust that they already <em>do</em>), and (b) I can be slightly more confident in friendly interactions because I can assume that people probably dislike me significantly less than I might intuitively feel they do.</p>
<p>Someone suggested that this asymmetry may be caused by the fact that I tend to be very open and sharing about my feelings and insecurities and vulnerabilities, which makes people feel more connected to me, while I’m not as good at getting people to open up to me, which makes me feel less connected to them. I have observed that I do tend to sacrifice asking people about themselves in favor of oversharing my own experiences, so this is something else I want to work on.</p>
<h1 id="purpose-authority-and-confidence">Purpose, authority, and confidence</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>As I mentioned, one of my goals for the Weekend was meeting new people and, as I mentioned, I was having a lot of difficulty with that. This made me feel out of place and really useless a lot of the time. Then I saw people who were very distinctly not useless: the organizers were running around, doing important organizing. They didn’t need to worry about fuzzily defined personal goals because they had a clear purpose to fulfill. I imagine that having a purpose like that would have made me feel better. Toward the end of the Weekend, for example, I helped a bit with the clean-up, and that was significantly more comfortable (and confident) than sitting around, not knowing what to do. I decided that, if I’m going to attend the next Community Weekend, I would like to help organize the event. (I haven’t talked about this with this year’s organizers yet, and unfortunately I currently don’t actually know whether I can attend next year.)</p>
<h1 id="you-can-meditate-lying-down">You can meditate lying down</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>During the awesome amazing fantastic incredible <a href="http://sevensecularsermons.org/">Games Of Entropy</a> reading, Daniel mentioned he likes to meditate lying down. I’d been struggling with keeping up my (theoretically) daily meditation because often I was tired and just wanted to take a nap instead. If I’m lying down, I realized, it’s like the perfect blend between a nap and meditation. Afterwards I am both physically rested and emotionally more stable, <em>and</em> the odds that I will actually <em>do</em> the meditation on a given day are significantly higher now.</p>
<h1 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h1>
<!-- FINISHED -->
<p>I may be overly optimistic here, but I get the impression that, with the right approach, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit for increasing my comfort levels in social settings, and I even feel motivated to talk to more people to practice. I have already had a few interesting conversations with people I met at the Weekend and it seems likely that there will be more of those in the future. So, while my happiness-value spent a sizeable portion of the event below zero, I don’t regret having attended and I’m extremely grateful to Anne for suggesting it.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:pity">
<p>This sounds so much like self-pity, but I don’t mean it that way, I promise! I’m just trying to describe a perfectly factual situation that consists of nothing but true facts.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:pity" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Before, my plan had been to see how my life develops and then possibly attend the 2016 LWCW.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Mon, 29 Jun 2015 21:59:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/lwcw2015/
http://ninoan.com/lwcw2015/LaTeX<p>I have helped typeset three theses and many shorter documents in LaTeX and I realized that I find myself googling the same things over and over again. Therefore I decided to collect all the problems I have solved so far on this page. At the bottom there is a list of unsolved problems. The reader is invited to give me advice in the comments.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>I will update this page when I learn new things.</p>
<p>This page is meant mostly as a reference for myself or others, for <em>how</em> to solve certain problems, technically. There won’t be much discussion of <em>why</em> you should do something a particular way. If you want to know more about that, I suggest you start with <a href="http://practicaltypography.com">Practical Typography</a> and if you’re still interested in typography after that, you can move on to <a href="http://www.amazon.de/Elements-Typographic-Style-Version-Anniversary/dp/0881792128/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1432924031&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+elements+of+typographic+style">The Elements of Typographic Style</a> or something.</p>
<ul id="markdown-toc">
<li><a href="#standard-packages-for-every-document" id="markdown-toc-standard-packages-for-every-document">Standard packages for every document</a></li>
<li><a href="#microtype" id="markdown-toc-microtype">Microtype</a></li>
<li><a href="#fonts" id="markdown-toc-fonts">Fonts</a> <ul>
<li><a href="#palatino" id="markdown-toc-palatino">Palatino</a></li>
<li><a href="#the-johannes-kepler-project" id="markdown-toc-the-johannes-kepler-project">The Johannes Kepler Project</a></li>
<li><a href="#a-note-on-numerals" id="markdown-toc-a-note-on-numerals">A note on numerals</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#spacing" id="markdown-toc-spacing">Spacing</a></li>
<li><a href="#colors" id="markdown-toc-colors">Colors</a></li>
<li><a href="#tables" id="markdown-toc-tables">Tables</a> <ul>
<li><a href="#colored-cells" id="markdown-toc-colored-cells">Colored cells</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#prettier-unordered-lists" id="markdown-toc-prettier-unordered-lists">Prettier unordered lists</a></li>
<li><a href="#prettier-ordered-lists" id="markdown-toc-prettier-ordered-lists">Prettier ordered lists</a></li>
<li><a href="#headers-and-footers" id="markdown-toc-headers-and-footers">Headers and footers</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter-and-section-headings--spacing" id="markdown-toc-chapter-and-section-headings--spacing">Chapter and section headings + spacing</a></li>
<li><a href="#custom-table-of-contents" id="markdown-toc-custom-table-of-contents">Custom table of contents</a></li>
<li><a href="#title-page" id="markdown-toc-title-page">Title page</a></li>
<li><a href="#figures" id="markdown-toc-figures">Figures</a> <ul>
<li><a href="#regular-floating-figures" id="markdown-toc-regular-floating-figures">Regular floating figures</a></li>
<li><a href="#margin-figures" id="markdown-toc-margin-figures">Margin figures</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#footnotes-as-margin-notes" id="markdown-toc-footnotes-as-margin-notes">Footnotes as margin notes</a></li>
<li><a href="#some-symbols" id="markdown-toc-some-symbols">Some symbols</a></li>
<li><a href="#kerning" id="markdown-toc-kerning">Kerning</a></li>
<li><a href="#colored-boxes" id="markdown-toc-colored-boxes">Colored boxes</a></li>
<li><a href="#prettier-ellipsis" id="markdown-toc-prettier-ellipsis">Prettier ellipsis</a></li>
<li><a href="#only-numbering-certain-lines-of-an-align-environment" id="markdown-toc-only-numbering-certain-lines-of-an-align-environment">Only numbering certain lines of an <code class="highlighter-rouge">align</code> environment</a></li>
<li><a href="#what-i-havent-figured-out-yet" id="markdown-toc-what-i-havent-figured-out-yet">What I haven’t figured out yet</a></li>
</ul>
<!--
# Downloadable templates
If you don't feel like reading thousands of words on the minutia of LaTeX issues, you can download one of these templates, use them, run into problems, and read this document after all.
**TODO add**
* One-sided article
* Article with margin-pars
* Book (or thesis or something)
-->
<h1 id="standard-packages-for-every-document">Standard packages for every document</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage[a4paper, left=4.5cm, right=4.5cm, top=3cm, bottom=4.5cm, marginparwidth=4cm]{geometry}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amsmath,amssymb}
\usepackage[hidelinks=true]{hyperref}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
</code></pre></div>
<p>You probably know what most of these do. The <code class="highlighter-rouge">geometry</code> settings used here work well for symmetrical layouts. For asymmetrical layouts I like to use 2cm/6cm for <code class="highlighter-rouge">inner</code>/<code class="highlighter-rouge">outer</code>. That way I can put <a href="#footnotes-as-margin-notes">footnotes</a> and <a href="#margin-figures">pictures</a> in the margins.</p>
<h1 id="microtype">Microtype</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage[activate={true,nocompatibility},final=true,kerning=true,spacing=true,tracking=true,shrink=30,stretch=30,factor=0]{microtype}
\microtypecontext{spacing=french}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Apart from the standard packages above, the <code class="highlighter-rouge">microtype</code> package is the single most important package in existence and should be included in every document. It does a number of things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Glyph reshaping. Characters are stretched or shrunk by up to 3% (adjustable with <code class="highlighter-rouge">shrink</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">stretch</code>) to improve justification. This will save you many overfull hboxes and even get rid of a lot of hyphenation without producing overlarge spaces.</li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">kerning</code> and <code class="highlighter-rouge">spacing</code> probably fixes some kerning and spacing issues. <code class="highlighter-rouge">tracking</code> adds some letter spacing for small caps.<sup id="fnref:Butterick"><a href="#fn:Butterick" class="footnote">1</a></sup></li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">nocompatibility</code> means you get the best possible result instead of <code class="highlighter-rouge">microtype</code> trying to keep the page breaks and such the same as without the package.</li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">factor</code> controls how much punctuation protrudes past the end of the line. Some people, for example, like having hyphens at the ends of lines sticking out into the margin. Personally, I don’t like that. You get 100% protrusion with <code class="highlighter-rouge">factor=1000</code>.</li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">final=true</code> means <code class="highlighter-rouge">microtype</code> is activated even when you use the <code class="highlighter-rouge">draft</code> option in the <code class="highlighter-rouge">documentclass</code> declaration. This doesn’t have any effect on the final document.</li>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">spacing=french</code> is the same as calling <code class="highlighter-rouge">\frenchspacing</code> in the document body and prevents spaces between sentences from stretching wider than a normal word space. You might like that, but french spacing is the standard for most printed material nowadays.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="fonts">Fonts</h1>
<p>I don’t have a huge problem with Computer Modern, but (1) it is overused, and (2) since it’s the default, most typographic sins are committed with Computer Modern, so I sometimes get a bad feeling about it (like with Times).</p>
<p>These are some acceptable fonts:</p>
<h2 id="palatino">Palatino</h2>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage[osf,sc]{mathpazo}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Palatino is like the Times New Roman of pretty fonts. It’s like everyone who’s unsatisfied with Times goes through their system fonts and says, “oh, that looks fancy!” and chooses Palatino. This means it comes close to being overused, but it still looks good enough that you can use it without feeling bad. Also, the <code class="highlighter-rouge">mathpazo</code> package offers real small caps (<code class="highlighter-rouge">sc</code>), oldstyle numerals (<code class="highlighter-rouge">osf</code>), and most of the mathematical symbols you will ever need.</p>
<p>It also works well with Euler math if you’re into that kind of thing.</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{euler}
</code></pre></div>
<h2 id="the-johannes-kepler-project">The Johannes Kepler Project</h2>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage[oldstylenums]{kpfonts}
</code></pre></div>
<p>I’ve not used this font yet but, apart from the capital T, I like the look of it. Like Palatino, Kepler offers real oldstyle figures, real small caps, and extensive math support. There is also a sans serif version of Kepler that you might want to use in combination with the serif version, but I haven’t looked at that, so it might suck.</p>
<p>If you’re inclined to save ink, Kepler also has a <code class="highlighter-rouge">light</code> option.<sup id="fnref:kp-light"><a href="#fn:kp-light" class="footnote">2</a></sup></p>
<h2 id="a-note-on-numerals">A note on numerals</h2>
<p>In normal text, you want to use oldstyle figures<sup id="fnref:numerals"><a href="#fn:numerals" class="footnote">3</a></sup> (lowercase numbers). You only want to use lining figures (uppercase numbers) in combination with all caps, in mathematical expressions, or in tables. With the settings I’ve described above, Palatino and Kepler will automatically switch to lining figures in math mode. If you want to set all the numbers in a block as lining figures, you can place</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\fontfamily{pplx}\selectfont
</code></pre></div>
<p>for Palatino, and</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\fontfamily{jkpx}\selectfont
</code></pre></div>
<p>for Kepler at the beginning of the block.</p>
<h1 id="spacing">Spacing</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{setspace}
\setstretch{1.1}
\setlength{\parskip}{0pt}
\setlength{\parindent}{1.4em}
</code></pre></div>
<p>The default line spacing (<code class="highlighter-rouge">\setstretch</code>) is usually too narrow. For most texts, a setting of <code class="highlighter-rouge">1.1</code> looks good, for very math-heavy or German texts I go up to <code class="highlighter-rouge">1.14</code> to avoid collisions between ascenders, descenders, accented mathematical symbols, etc.</p>
<p>I prefer indented paragraphs to vertically spaced paragraphs. If you like vertical space between your paragraphs, set <code class="highlighter-rouge">\parindent</code> to 0; if you like indented paragraphs, set <code class="highlighter-rouge">\parskip</code> to 0. Otherwise LaTeX may add spacing between paragraphs, which will look hideous if the paragraphs are indented.</p>
<h1 id="colors">Colors</h1>
<p>To define colors:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{color}
\definecolor{color-name}{gray}{0.8}
\definecolor{other-color}{rgb}{0.8, 0.9, 1}
</code></pre></div>
<p>To use colors:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\color{color-name}
</code></pre></div>
<h1 id="tables">Tables</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{booktabs,suinitx}
\begin{table}[htb]\fontfamily{pplx}\selectfont
\begin{center}
\begin{tabular}{lrcS[table-format=1.1]}
\toprule%
left &amp; right &amp; centered &amp; \multicolumn{1}{c}{aligned numbers}\\\midrule{}
1 &amp; 2 &amp; 3 &amp; 4.5 \\
\bottomrule{}
\end{tabular}
\caption{Description}
\label{tab:label}
\end{center}
\end{table}
</code></pre></div>
<p>The <code class="highlighter-rouge">S</code> alignment option aligns numbers by their decimal point. Because the column title isn’t a number, it needs to be wrapped inside the weird <code class="highlighter-rouge">\multicolumn</code> command. The <code class="highlighter-rouge">[table-format=x.y]</code> aligns the column in a way that numbers with <code class="highlighter-rouge">x</code> digits to the left and <code class="highlighter-rouge">y</code> digits to the right of the decimal point are centered. You can omit this option if everything looks fine, but it’s useful as soon as you have different numbers of digits in each row.</p>
<p>If you use <code class="highlighter-rouge">S</code>, the numbers will be set in math-mode, so they will automatically be lining figures. If you use <code class="highlighter-rouge">l</code>, <code class="highlighter-rouge">r</code>, or <code class="highlighter-rouge">c</code>, you will have to declare the <code class="highlighter-rouge">\fontfamily</code> at the top of the table to get them to look right.</p>
<h2 id="colored-cells">Colored cells</h2>
<p>Include the package</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{colortbl}
</code></pre></div>
<p>and call</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\cellcolor{color-name}
</code></pre></div>
<p>inside your table-cell. The cell coloring doesn’t go all the way to horizontal rules, making the coloring discontinuous. That looks weird when you want to have entire columns in one color. I haven’t figured out how to prevent that.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Q8BWhBS.png" alt="Table with colored cells." /></p>
<h1 id="prettier-unordered-lists">Prettier unordered lists</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\newcommand{\sbt}{\,\begin{picture}(-1,1)(-1,-3)\circle*{2.2}\end{picture}\ }
\renewcommand{\labelitemi}{\sbt}
\renewcommand{\labelitemii}{\sbt}
</code></pre></div>
<p>The bullet character (•) is too large. To get better looking bulleted lists, this snipped works wonders. You can manipulate the size of the circle by changing the <code class="highlighter-rouge">2.2</code> above to something else. If you need more than two levels in your lists, you can duplicate the last line and change <code class="highlighter-rouge">\labelitemii</code> to <code class="highlighter-rouge">\labelitemiii</code>.</p>
<h1 id="prettier-ordered-lists">Prettier ordered lists</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{enumerate}
\begin{enumerate}[1]
\item Item One
\item Item Two
\end{enumerate}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Make numbered lists less cluttered.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Fjjl4ei.png" alt="Better lists" /></p>
<h1 id="headers-and-footers">Headers and footers</h1>
<p>If you’re using the <code class="highlighter-rouge">book</code> document class, <em>never ever</em> use the default headers. I don’t know whose idea it was to make the headers <em>ITALIC ALL CAPS</em>, but trust me, it was a terrible idea. This setting was surprisingly difficult to change, too.</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\newcommand{\spacedlowsmallcaps}[1]{\lowercase{\textsc{#1}}}
\usepackage[automark]{scrpage2}
\clearscrheadings
\renewcommand{\chaptermark}[1]{\markboth{\spacedlowsmallcaps{#1}}{\spacedlowsmallcaps{#1}}}
\renewcommand{\sectionmark}[1]{\markright{\thesection\enspace\spacedlowsmallcaps{#1}}}
\lehead{\mbox{\llap{\small\thepage\kern2em}\hfil{\headmark}}}
\rohead{\mbox{\hfil{\headmark}\rlap{\small\kern2em\thepage}}}
\renewcommand{\headfont}{\small}
</code></pre></div>
<p>I don’t even want to look at those settings.</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/cmAyiwd.png" alt="Example headers" /></p>
<p>You can take this as inspiration and go from there.</p>
<h1 id="chapter-and-section-headings--spacing">Chapter and section headings + spacing</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{titlesec}
\newfont{\chapterNumber}{eurb10 scaled 7000}
\titleformat{\chapter}[display]%
{\relax}{\mbox{}\marginpar{\vspace*{-\baselineskip}\color{chapternumbergray}\chapterNumber\thechapter}}{0pt}%
{\LARGE\itshape}[\normalsize\vspace*{.8\baselineskip}\titlerule]%
\titlespacing*{\chapter}{0pt}{0cm}{1cm}
\titleformat{\section}{\Large}{\makebox[0cm][r]{\thesection\hspace{1em}}}{0em}{\scshape\lowercase}
\titlespacing*{\section}{0pt}{\baselineskip}{\baselineskip}
\titleformat{\subsection}{\large}{\thesubsection}{.6em}{\itshape}
\titlespacing*{\subsection}{0pt}{\baselineskip}{\baselineskip}
\titleformat{\subsubsection}{\bfseries}{}{}{}
\titlespacing*{\subsubsection}{0pt}{\baselineskip}{\baselineskip}
</code></pre></div>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/iaELHja.png" alt="Headings" /></p>
<p>These settings are strongly inspired by Robert Bringhurst’s <a href="http://www.amazon.de/Elements-Typographic-Style-Version-Anniversary/dp/0881792128/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1432924031&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+elements+of+typographic+style">The Elements of Typographic Style</a>. The chapter numbers are set in the Euler font.</p>
<h1 id="custom-table-of-contents">Custom table of contents</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{tocloft}
\usepackage{textcase}
\setcounter{tocdepth}{2}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Chapters:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\renewcommand{\cftchappresnum}{\bfseries}
\renewcommand{\cftchapfont}{\normalfont}
\renewcommand{\cftchappagefont}{\color{pagenumbergray}\normalfont}
\renewcommand{\cftchapleader}{\hspace{1.5em}}
\renewcommand{\cftchapafterpnum}{\cftparfillskip}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Sections:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\renewcommand{\cftsecpresnum}{\scshape}
\renewcommand{\cftsecfont}{\normalfont}
\renewcommand{\cftsecpagefont}{\color{pagenumbergray}\normalfont}
\renewcommand{\cftsecleader}{\hspace{1.5em}}
\renewcommand{\cftsecafterpnum}{\cftparfillskip}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Subsections:</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\renewcommand{\cftsubsecpresnum}{\scshape}
\renewcommand{\cftsubsecfont}{\normalfont}
\renewcommand{\cftsubsecpagefont}{\color{pagenumbergray}\normalfont}
\renewcommand{\cftsubsecleader}{\hspace{1.5em}}
\renewcommand{\cftsubsecafterpnum}{\cftparfillskip}
</code></pre></div>
<p>This is in part influenced by Bringhurst and in part by common sense. Most tables of content are typeset terribly.</p>
<h1 id="title-page">Title page</h1>
<p>An example for a title page. The contents of this will depend very strongly on the specific document you’re making.</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\begin{titlepage}
\begin{center}
{\LARGE University Name}\\
\begin{figure}[h]
\hbox{}\hfill
\begin{minipage}[t]{10cm}
\begin{center}
\includegraphics[width=5cm]{university-logo}
\end{center}
\end{minipage}
\hfill\hbox{}
\end{figure}
{\large Department or something\\[2cm]}
{\huge Bachelor's Thesis\\[1cm]}
{\Large\bf Title\\[1.0cm]}
{\small Author:}\\[0.2cm] {\large Author}\\[0.2cm]
{\small date}\\[0.8cm] {\small Advisor:}\\[0.2cm]
{\large Advisor name}\\[0.2cm]
Advisor's employer\\[2.2cm]
{\small Address}
\end{center}
\end{titlepage}
</code></pre></div>
<h1 id="figures">Figures</h1>
<h2 id="regular-floating-figures">Regular floating figures</h2>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\begin{figure}[tbh]
\centering
\includegraphics[width=8cm]{bunnies.jpg}
\caption{A normal figure.}
\label{fig:normal}
\end{figure}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Sometimes you want to put a <code class="highlighter-rouge">p</code> in the position options, too.</p>
<h2 id="margin-figures">Margin figures</h2>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\marginpar{ %
\includegraphics[width=\marginparwidth]{picture}%
\captionof{figure}{A margin figure.}%
\label{fig:marginfig}%
}
</code></pre></div>
<p>For best results, use <a href="#footnotes-as-margin-notes"><code class="highlighter-rouge">\raggedright</code> or <code class="highlighter-rouge">\RaggedRight</code></a>.</p>
<h1 id="footnotes-as-margin-notes">Footnotes as margin notes</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\usepackage{ragged2e}
\newcounter{mnote}
\renewcommand{\footnote}[1]{ %
\refstepcounter{mnote}%
\mbox{\textsuperscript{\themnote}}%
\marginpar{\footnotesize\RaggedRight\mbox{\themnote}\hspace{5pt}#1}%
}
</code></pre></div>
<p>You can call these with <code class="highlighter-rouge">\footnote</code>. If you need to move the content of the footnote up along the margin, use</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\newcommand{\fnhere}[1]{\refstepcounter{mnote}\marginpar{\footnotesize\RaggedRight\mbox{\themnote}\hspace{5pt}#1}}
\newcommand{\fnref}{\mbox{\textsuperscript{\themnote}}}
</code></pre></div>
<p>Then you can call <code class="highlighter-rouge">\fnhere{Footnote content}</code> where you want the note to appear in the margin and <code class="highlighter-rouge">\fnref{}</code> where you want the reference to appear in the text. This is only for moving footnotes <em>up</em>. They should move <em>down</em> automatically, if there are other <code class="highlighter-rouge">\marginpar</code>s in the way.</p>
<p><code class="highlighter-rouge">\raggedright</code> makes the text left-aligned, which looks better because margins are usually too narrow for proper justified text. <code class="highlighter-rouge">\RaggedRight</code> requires the <code class="highlighter-rouge">ragged2e</code> package and will re-enable hyphenation for the left-aligned text.</p>
<h1 id="some-symbols">Some symbols</h1>
<p>Some symbols I sometimes forget.</p>
<ul>
<li><code class="highlighter-rouge">\textperiodcentered</code> becomes the mid-dot (·). You should use this more.</li>
</ul>
<h1 id="kerning">Kerning</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>a\kern+1ptb
</code></pre></div>
<p>This adds 1pt of separation between the letters a and b. When I have the time, I use this extensively for adding space to the insides of paretheses since they’re set too tight in most fonts. Also works in math mode.</p>
<h1 id="colored-boxes">Colored boxes</h1>
<p>I rarely use these because I always run into problems. But it can be kinda pretty and you can probably fix the issues if your document isn’t too complex.</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\definecolor{boxblue}{rgb}{0.8, 0.9, 1}
\usepackage[framemethod=tikz]{mdframed}
\newmdenv[innerlinewidth=0.5pt,roundcorner=2pt,backgroundcolor=boxblue, linecolor=boxblue,innerleftmargin=6mm,innerrightmargin=6mm,innertopmargin=6pt,innerbottommargin=6pt,skipabove=1ex,skipbelow=1ex]{mybox}
</code></pre></div>
<p>You use this with</p>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\begin{mybox}
Content
\end{mybox}
</code></pre></div>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/oVrY7eB.png" alt="Colored boxes" /></p>
<h1 id="prettier-ellipsis">Prettier ellipsis</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\newcommand{\dotdot}{.\hspace{.6pt}.\hspace{.6pt}.}
</code></pre></div>
<p>The normal <code class="highlighter-rouge">\ldots{}</code> command creates too much space between the dots and, even with french spacing turned on, the amounts of space to the left and right of the ellipsis aren’t the same, so it looks uneven. You may need to adjust the amount of <code class="highlighter-rouge">\hspace</code>, depending on the font.</p>
<p>Comparison:</p>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/GDuFDyF.png" alt="Comparison between `\ldots` and `\dotdot`" /></p>
<h1 id="only-numbering-certain-lines-of-an-align-environment">Only numbering certain lines of an <code class="highlighter-rouge">align</code> environment</h1>
<div class="highlighter-rouge"><pre class="highlight"><code>\begin{align}
1 + 2 &amp;= a\nonumber\\
3 + 4 &amp;= b \cdot e^{2\tau}\nonumber\\
6 + 1 &amp;= c
\end{align}
</code></pre></div>
<p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/Gyxnnvw.png" alt="Only the third line has a number" /></p>
<h1 id="what-i-havent-figured-out-yet">What I haven’t figured out yet</h1>
<ul>
<li>Outdented lists, such that the bullet symbol or number is placed in the margin. Those are pretty.</li>
<li>Global kerning pairs without using LuaLaTeX. Alternatively: Get <code class="highlighter-rouge">microtype</code> to run in LuaLaTeX. Kerning parentheses manually takes a lot of time and search-and-replace is messy.</li>
<li>Figures that take up the whole width of the text and have their description as a <code class="highlighter-rouge">\marginpar</code>.</li>
<li>Figures that take up a fraction (e.g. half) of the text-width and have the description in the remaining space next to them.</li>
<li>Full width figures that are as wide as the text plus the width of <code class="highlighter-rouge">\marginpar</code>s and have their description below.</li>
</ul>
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<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:Butterick">
<p>From <a href="http://practicaltypography.com/letterspacing.html">Practical Typography</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Lowercase letters don’t ordinarily need letterspacing. Nor do capital letters when they appear at the beginning of a word or sentence, because they’re designed to fit correctly next to lowercase letters. But when you use capital letters together, that spacing looks too tight.</p>
<p>That’s why you always add 5–12% extra letterspacing to text in all caps or small caps, particularly at small sizes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="#fnref:Butterick" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:kp-light">
<p>From the <a href="ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/tex/CTAN/fonts/kpfonts/doc/kpfonts.pdf">documentation</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Save up your toner and the environment, use the “light” option, it’s 20% toner less!</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>The metrics are the same. The display is not very good, but the print is fine if you like light fonts.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="#fnref:kp-light" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:numerals">
<p>I never know which word to use. “Numerals”? “Figures”? “Numbers”? And then I just end up using them all interchangeably and it’s terrible.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:numerals" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Tue, 02 Jun 2015 14:40:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/latex/
http://ninoan.com/latex/Observations<p>Observations:</p>
<!--more-->
<ul>
<li>I don’t work well when tired.</li>
<li>I don’t work well when scared.</li>
<li>“<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opipramol">Opipramol</a> … is an antidepressant and anxiolytic used in Germany and other European countries.”</li>
<li>I’ve been taking 100mg of Opipramol (almost) every day for the last ~2 years.</li>
<li>I’ve been feeling (almost) constantly tired for ~3–4 years.</li>
<li>I have severe concentration issues.
<ul>
<li>Akrasia is not as big a problem as it once was. I can sit down and decide to work. Being able to think / pay attention for extended periods of time seems to be a big issue.</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>My psychiatrist told me the Opipramol might be hindering my concentration and decreasing the dose might help me focus.</li>
<li>I forgot to take my Opipramol a few times in the morning (I take 50mg in the morning and 50mg in the evening) and only noticed this when I was feeling anxious during the afternoon / early evening.</li>
<li>I tried reducing the dose by taking only one 50mg pill some time around noon but felt anxious throughout the day, so I went back up to two pills.</li>
<li>About a week ago I started taking splittable 50mg pills, so I received a dose of 25mg in the morning and 25mg in the evening. I didn’t feel more anxious than usual – perhaps even less.</li>
<li>About half a week later I noticed I had forgotten to take the 25mg in the morning but didn’t feel any unusual anxiety. I decided to try sticking to 25mg per day.</li>
<li>My anxiety has not increased.</li>
<li>Yesterday I felt extremely dizzy, like I was about to pass out, in combination with headaches. Headaches are common for me, this kind of dizziness is not.</li>
<li>Yesterday I also felt unusually awake. I normally start feeling very tired around 1100–1200, but yesterday I didn’t. I took a nap anyway. The headache improved, the dizziness didn’t.</li>
<li>I didn’t take Opipramol today.</li>
<li>Today the dizziness and headache are still there, but less so than yesterday.</li>
<li>I am optimistic that I will be able to live without depending on Opipramol.</li>
<li>I am optimistic that I will be more productive without taking Opipramol.</li>
<li>I tend to get super excited about anything that looks like it’s going to improve my situation and thus may have skewed the facts to point to the conclusion that everything is going to be awesome and I will never have any problems anymore, like, by the end of this week, even though I do not find that probable.</li>
</ul>
<p>I’m curious to see how this develops.</p>
Wed, 27 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/observations/
http://ninoan.com/observations/How not to design a watch<p><small>[<em>This gets kinda rant-y. Don’t worry though, it’s not about the </em><em>Watch.</em>]</small></p>
<p>I found it irritating that I had to adjust the time on my wristwatch twice every year because of DST, so I bought a radio controlled watch that would do this automatically, and it’s working fantastically: Now I don’t even notice when DST starts or ends. Except when I stop and ask myself why I’m feeling so tired all of a sudden – but that’s beside the point. Here’s the thing:</p>
<p><!--more--></p>
<p>Every 24 hours, the watch stops for around 20 seconds to look for a signal and reset itself to the correct time. This is good, of course. Otherwise the watch wouldn’t know when DST starts or ends, and it would all be for naught. And besides, you don’t need the second-hand most of the time anyway.</p>
<figure><img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83659/nino.github.io-files/watch.jpg" alt="The watch." title="Pictures make everything more interesting."/><figcaption>The watch.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Still, it would be good to put the reset time at some point when most people don’t look at their watches. “How about at night?” one engineer probably said. “What a fantastic idea!” another exclaimed, “People sleep at night!” And they went forth and set the reset time to midnight. Of course things aren’t always accurate, so my watch stops every night at around 2–3 seconds before midnight.</p>
<p>There are not many times at which I need a sort of accurate second-hand, but the last few seconds before midnight are practically the worst time I can imagine for an interruption to happen. First of all, I would assume that <em>a lot</em> more people are asleep at, like, 3 AM than at midnight, and second of all, midnight is like the number one Schelling Point for things to count down to. Think birthdays or New Year’s. Nino is like, “You guys, I got this. I have an accurate watch.” And then everyone is like, “yeah, ok,” and then they say “10 … 9 … 8 …” and when they’re at “3” the watch stops and Nino is confused and the others keep counting, and this is <em>not okay.</em></p>
<p>Why couldn’t they make the watch reset at 10 seconds <em>after</em> midnight? Or at 2 or 3 AM?</p>
<p>I have a feeling that this wasn’t super well thought through.</p>
Sun, 17 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/watch/
http://ninoan.com/watch/Experience Poverty<p>By now many of you will have heard of <a href="http://euroexperiencepoverty.causevox.com/">Experience Poverty</a>, which is similar to those charity marathons or bike rides where you do something and other people give you money for it, except the money doesn’t go to you, but to a charity. For this particular event, the participants spend less than $2.50/day (the amount that half of the world has to live with <em>all</em> the time) on food for three days and the money goes to the <a href="http://www.evidenceaction.org/#deworm-the-world">Deworm the World Initiative</a>, one of GiveWell’s <a href="http://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities">top rated charities</a>. Deworm the World works with governments to organize school-based deworming programs, which allows many children to be healthier, attend school more, and eventually get better jobs and have one less thing to worry about in their lives. You can find more information about what they do and GiveWell’s evaluation of their work <a href="http://www.evidenceaction.org/dewormtheworld">here</a> and <a href="http://www.givewell.org/international/top-charities/deworm-world-initiative">here</a>.</p>
<p>Now, I will be participating, so if you want to make the world a slightly better place, I’d be delighted if you could consider donating to my <a href="http://euroexperiencepoverty.causevox.com/nino-annighfer">fundraiser</a>. To make this even more exciting, I will be doing the special “challenge mode” where, instead of $2.50 I attempt to live off less than €1.50 during the three days. This is about as much as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold">international poverty line</a>.</p>
<p>The event will be from April 22 until April 24, so if you want to donate, don’t hesitate, before it’s too late!</p>
Sun, 19 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/experience-poverty/
http://ninoan.com/experience-poverty/Reaching the goal is not an action<p><small>[<em>This was difficult to write in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn’t live inside my brain and I don’t know if I succeeded. I’d be curious to know if this makes any sense at all to anyone who is not me.</em>]</small></p>
<p>Nate Soares <a href="http://mindingourway.com/moving-towards-the-goal/">writes</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>When I have a big problem that I want solved, I have found that there is one simple process which tends to work. It goes like this:</p>
<ol>
<li>Move towards the goal.</li>
</ol>
</blockquote>
<p>What I’m about to write is <em>kind of</em> part of what his post is about, but it adds a layer of framing that has allowed me to feel virtually no anxiety about the future for almost a week now, which is extremely unusual for me. I wanted to share my thoughts in case anyone finds them useful.</p>
<!--more-->
<p>So I know what the goal is and I’ve figured out the next action that will move me closer to success. At this point everything is fine, but as soon as I look into the future and try to visualize the transition from the current state to the state of having reached the goal my mind tells me there’s some mysterious huge task that still needs to be completed – one that feels unlike any “next action” I can take along the way. Like all the next actions are just preparation, and the actual <em>accomplishing</em> of the goal is different – something I have no idea how to do because I’ve never done anything like it before.</p>
<p>This probably sounds vague, so here’s an example.</p>
<p>Say I want to make friends. I’ve made friends before, I have some memory of what I did prior to calling the relationship a friendship – talk to the person, maybe make a joke or two, don’t be a huge dick, don’t complain about their improper use of hyphens as dashes, that sort of thing. And then at some point: <em>bam!</em>, friendship. So I say to my brain, “brain,” I say, “let’s go talk to people.” And my brain says, “okay, but then what?” – “Then we can become friends.” – “But how does the actual becoming-friends work? You only know how to talk to them. You don’t know how to create a friendship. If you can’t figure that out we might as well not try at all.” And so I stay silent.</p>
<p>There are many other situations where I feel like this. When I’m trying to study, for example, a good next action might be to do one of the homework problems. And my brain tells me, “yeah, you can do this now, but have you looked at what’s still in front of you? You still have to work through this whole textbook and do all those exercises and pass those two exams and do you <em>really</em> think you can do all this? Those are really big tasks and you’re just a small, not particularly impressive person.” So I start worrying, which makes me unable to focus on the work I have to do <em>now</em>, which makes me fail later.</p>
<p>But fortunately, for once, the truth is more pleasant than what my intuition tells me: There are no big mysterious tasks you need to complete in order to reach your goals. Once you completed all the challenges that stand in the way of success, <em>you have reached the goal.</em> Everything you will ever need to do is find the next thing to do and do that in this moment. When you have done that, reaching the goal is not another task but a consequence that happens on its own.</p>
<p>And in the meantime, there are never any tasks too big for you to handle. You won’t need to study for three years, you won’t need to prepare that exam, you won’t need to write a whole novel, you won’t need to create a friendship out of thin air. All you need to do is look at one homework problem, read one more sentence in the textbook, type another key on your keyboard, say another word to someone you like.</p>
<p>Sure, from your current perspective you can see big tasks ahead, but you won’t exist anymore by the time those become the next action. Those tasks will be handled by the millions of consecutive future-you’s, all working on their own next action for the infinitesimal amount of time they exist and letting the next one continue.</p>
<p>Thinking about my goals this way helped me worry less about not knowing how to solve big problems and not being sure whether I will succeed in the end. Instead I can now focus on <em>right now</em>, and let “someone else” take care of the rest.</p>
Sun, 29 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/reaching-the-goal-is-not-an-action/
http://ninoan.com/reaching-the-goal-is-not-an-action/I have an excellent awkwardness memory<p>People always tell me not to worry so much about seeming awkward in social situations. Like, “oh, nobody is ever going to remember you being weird or stuttery or that time where you didn’t know what to say, or said something wrong, or mispronounced something. They’re all just as caught up with thinking about their own awkwardness that they don’t even notice <em>you’re</em> being weird as well.”</p>
<p>And then I think, that makes sense, because I <em>do</em> spend a lot of time worrying about how I myself come across. And it’s good to keep in mind that other people probably do the same, because I tend to forget that other people are human as well and have emotions and issues themselves. (I think this is like a reverse typical mind fallacy. Does that already exist? If it doesn’t, we could call it the <em>a</em>typical mind fallacy.)</p>
<p>But when I think about it more, I realize that I am exceedingly good at detecting when other people might feel awkward – or, rather, when other people are in situations where I would feel awkward. And I always remember that. You know, that time when you were asked something by the teacher and you didn’t know the answer and looked really shameful and started blushing furiously and tried to force some words out, but you just didn’t know which ones and you were probably thinking, “Fuck, I should know this!” Or that time you were talking to a person at a party and you heard something wrong and replied something weird; chances are, I’ll obsess about your situations just as much as I would if it’d been me in the situation. And I’ll spend hours thinking <em>what could you have done differently to avoid this?</em></p>
<p>So now I’m wondering: Is this whole “nobody notices/remembers how awkward you are”-thing all a big lie that therapists tell to calm me down, or do I just have an especially good awkwardness memory?</p>
Sun, 22 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/awkwardness-memory/
http://ninoan.com/awkwardness-memory/Quotations<blockquote>
<p>Quotation marks were first cut in the middle of the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth, some printers liked to use them profusely. In books from the Baroque and Romantic periods, quotation marks are sometimes repeated at the beginning of every line of a long quotation. When these distractions were finally omitted, the space they had occupied was frequently retained. This is the origin of the indented block quotation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(From <a href="http://www.amazon.de/Elements-Typographic-Style-Version-4-0/dp/0881792128/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1425626560&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+elements+of+typographic+style">The Elements of Typographic Style</a>)</p>
Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/quotations/
http://ninoan.com/quotations/Joylent<p>Last Friday I received my first batch of <a href="http://joylent.eu">Joylent</a>, which is like Soylent, only the <em>J</em> stands for “Europe.” I’d ordered the “variety pack” with 15 meals, which means 5 bags with differently flavored powder: vanilla, banana, chocolate, and strawberry.</p>
<p>I was one of the people who fell in love with Soylent when it was still a Kickstarter and you couldn’t order it yet, not even in America. I can enjoy food in a social setting, and there are some things that taste pleasant, but generally, I’m not a big fan of food. Some people find cooking relaxing — I find it emotionally draining. There are too many things going on, you have to be careful not to touch anything or you’ll burn your fingers, and the food will get horribly burned, too, if you stop stirring for half a second. Hence I just end up eating toast with cheese or Nutella or something, 99% of the time, and then I keep biting the inside of my mouth instead of the food, so everything tastes like blood anyway.</p>
<p>If drinking three glasses of gray liquid every day could make all that go away and the only price was that it didn’t taste as exciting? That would be fantastic.</p>
<p>So I opened the first package, vanilla, and took in the kind of un-vanilla-y smell of the enormously large quantity of powder. If you’re used to two spoons of protein powder in ≈450ml of milk or water, this will be a bit of a shock. And it doesn’t just <em>look</em> like a lot of powder, you can tell while you’re drinking it, too, because there’s not enough water to dissolve it all. I’m not going to lie: the first mouthful of that stuff was <em>really</em> disgusting. But I didn’t let that stop me.</p>
<p>While I continued to drink and did my best not to throw up all over the kitchen table, my hunger did start to fade, though I did eat other stuff as well because let’s be serious, 2100 calories for a full day? I haven’t tracked this with great accuracy, but I’m pretty sure I can eat at least 2500 calories and still lose weight.</p>
<p>Trying the next flavor, banana, on the second day, I realized my initial disgust may have been due, in part, to the fact that vanilla flavored Joylent tastes infinitely worse than any of the other kinds. Banana is better, chocolate is better still, and strawberry is about the same as chocolate. Of course it still feels like mud, but I got used to that surprisingly quickly.</p>
<p>My digestion wasn’t super excited about this whole experiment, but as long as I ate <em>some</em> solid food at some point during the day (which I was doing anyway, lest I starve) it seemed to work out fine. Also, it’s not like my digestion is super excited about <em>anything</em>. Maybe I should see a doctor about that. Okay, before everyone starts shouting “TMI, TMI!”, let’s move on to something more fun.</p>
<h1 id="things-you-can-do-to-put-more-joy-in-joylent">Things you can do to put more joy in Joylent</h1>
<ul>
<li>Mix it with orange juice. Seriously, this is amazing. (I tried this with vanilla or banana, if I remember correctly.)</li>
<li>Put the protein powder you still have lying around in so you get more protein, better taste, <em>and</em> more calories at the same time. This way, after the gym, instead of drinking a protein shake and eating dinner, you can combine both into one!</li>
<li>Put the Joylent in the fridge for an hour before you drink it. I feel like this helps dissolve the powder better, or masks the powdery texture more, but this may be a placebo. In any case, it’s much more pleasant to drink it cold than lukewarm.</li>
<li>Mix in some flavored soy milk. I like to put chocolate soy milk into chocolate Joylent.</li>
</ul>
<p>These were just the things I tried in the short time where this experiment went on. I’m sure there are a million other things you can do.</p>
<h1 id="so-am-i-going-to-buy-more">So, am I going to buy more?</h1>
<p>At first it looked very much like I wasn’t even going to finish the 5 bags I had bought, but as soon as I went back to normal food, I started craving Joylent because the whole process just sucks so much less. First of all it’s faster to make and consume, and second of all, you know how after lunch you just want to sleep for an hour? That doesn’t seem to happen with Joylent.<sup id="fnref:1"><a href="#fn:1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> The hunger just goes away quietly after some time, while I’m still able to stay awake and think.</p>
<p>In conclusion, nutrition is not a solved problem, but at least I don’t have to use the toaster so often anymore.</p>
<div class="footnotes">
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><strong>Update:</strong> After further experimentation, I have to report that, actually, it does.&nbsp;<a href="#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote">&#8617;</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/joylent/
http://ninoan.com/joylent/The Power of Dimensions<p>I suspect the majority of people who have any use for this already know about it and use it daily, but I have only recently realized how cool this is.</p>
<p>You know how you always forget what the relationship between <em>c</em>, <em>λ</em>, and <em>ν</em> is? Like, they give you the energy of a photon and you’re supposed to calculate the wavelength? You know <em>E</em> = <nobr><em>h ν</em></nobr>, but now you have to figure out how to convert the frequency to a wavelength. Now, instead of looking the formula up on Wikipedia, how about using dimensional analysis? You write down the unit of <em>λ</em>, which is m, and then you only need to figure out how to construct that unit with a speed and a frequency. Speed is <nobr>m s<sup>–1</sup></nobr> and frequency is <nobr>s<sup>–1</sup></nobr>, so to cancel the seconds out, you divide the speed by the frequency and get <nobr>m s<sup>–1</sup> s</nobr> = m, from which you can easily see that <em>λ</em> must be <nobr><em>c</em> / <em>ν</em></nobr>. And you’re done.</p>
<p>Another good example is when you have an exponential function or a sine or cosine. You know the argument for these functions must be dimensionless, so if you’re not sure what factors you have to put into the argument, you can just keep throwing stuff in there until all the units cancel and it’ll probably be right.</p>
<p>Or if you want to sanity check your calculations you need only look at your dimensions. When you see a sum of, say, a length and an area, you know you’ve done something wrong.</p>
<p>The same applies of course to the other kind of dimension — the one in vectors. When you try to put a three dimensional vector in an exponential function, you have a problem. You’re probably missing another vector to form a dot product with. Or if you’re trying to add a vector and a scalar, again, you know you’re missing something.</p>
<p>It seems pretty simple, but I was surprised how useful this is once you get the hang of it.</p>
Tue, 27 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/dimensions/
http://ninoan.com/dimensions/2014. Progress<p><small>[<em>I’m posting this a bit late, so if you’re confused by things like “this year” and “next year,” imagine I posted this on Dec 31, 2014, 23:59:59.</em>]</small></p>
<p>At the beginning of this year, the mere thought of speaking in front of a group of people literally scared me to death. I can now present a homework problem I have not spent a huge amount of thought on in the most sloppy way possible, be told in front of everyone that I did everything wrong, trip over something on the way back to my seat, and take it all without a sweat.</p>
<p>Finally, we’re making progress. Nino: 1, his brain: 0.</p>
<figure><img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83659/nino.github.io-files/2014-in-review.png" alt="Apparently Facebook thinks my year was all about the celebration of grumpy potatoes."/><figcaption>Apparently Facebook thinks my year was all about the celebration of grumpy potatoes.</figcaption></figure>
<p>The year is coming to a close and everyone is doing yearly reviews, so I decided to create my own. I used the <a href="http://alexvermeer.com/8760hours/">8760 hours template</a> and ended up with a text that is around 6,000 words long<sup><a id="ffn1" href="#fn1" class="footnote">1</a></sup> and contains pretty much everything that happened this past year, including many unpublishable details. This is a much shorter version that doesn’t have that problem and is hopefully less boring than the original for everyone who isn’t me.</p>
<h1>The past</h1>
<p>While 2014 was certainly not a <em>good</em> year, I think I can safely say it was the best one I’ve had, so far.</p>
<p>I learned a lot of new things, both about my field of study and about life in general, and, as I described above, I made a lot of progress on improving my mental health and confidence. I’ve managed to keep my depressive episodes to a minimum and, in an attempt to be a bit more agenty, I even moved out of my parents’ house and into a small place close to my university. On top of all that, financially, I’m in as good a position as someone without an income can hope to be.</p>
<p>The “not good” part of the year mostly revolved around school: In 2013 I’d discovered for the first time, that I am able to pass exams if I study enough. So, in 2014, I thought, I would just keep doing that and have the best grades in the world and everything would be amazing. After four exams I barely passed and one I postponed for another year because I was too distracted to focus, that optimism quickly vanished.</p>
<p>Over the course of the year I tried several techniques I read about on the internet to increase my productivity, and some worked for a while, which led me to announce numerous times to my friends and family, that I’d finally solved my productivity issues and it would all be smooth sailing from now on. Sadly, I kept being wrong. The fact that I always tried so many new things made my therapist very happy, but it was still frustrating that no lasting benefit ever came from the attempts.</p>
<h1>The present and future</h1>
<p>Over the last few weeks, things have been getting better again. To maintain some of that momentum, I sat down and had a good think about what I wanted to do with my life, since, maybe, having long-term goals would help motivate me to be more effective <em>now</em>. These are the main goals I came up with for 2015:</p>
<h2>Studying</h2>
<p>Wherever I choose to go after I finish my bachelor’s degree, better grades would probably increase my chances, since many schools, surprisingly, won’t accept students with bad grades. Therefore I commit to only producing grades that start with a “1,” starting next semester (that’s like an A(±), for all my millions of international readers). I’m not sure how hard this will be but I feel like my brain should be capable enough to make this reasonably possible, with some preparation.</p>
<p>Additionally, I will finish 10 textbooks. I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a textbook from start to finish, but this seems like a reasonable number to learn some new things. Also I think I read a similar number somewhere else so I’m sure this is a good idea.</p>
<h2>Writing</h2>
<p>I’m not a fantastic writer, and since it seems like writing would be a good skill to have, I’ll try to write at least 60,000 words this year and get into a habit of doing at least one pomo of writing per day. If this works well enough, I might even post more stuff on this site.</p>
<h2>Miscellaneous</h2>
<p>A few months ago I started doing mindfulness meditation and that was kind of fun, so I’ll try to keep doing a 10 –20 minute session every day.</p>
<p>In addition to that, I’ll go back to writing journals / daily reviews, and weekly reviews. I did the daily reviews for a while last year and it helped my brain stay sane, but I stopped when I figured out how to do the same without writing. Now that I’m having a more goal-oriented year, I’d like to have more content to base my next yearly review on, so I’ll start again. The weekly reviews are intended to give me more of a big-picture view and track my overall progress toward my goals. We’ll see how that goes.</p>
<p>Lastly, I have an extremely embarrassing habit, that I desperately need to get rid of. It looks a bit similar to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excoriation_disorder#mediaviewer/File:Fingers-dermatillomania.jpg">this</a> (maybe don’t click that link if you’re eating), and if I still haven’t stopped that shit by next December, I’ll give out 100 €. I’ll do a big raffle and everything. It’ll be amazing. But seriously. Why is this so hard.</p>
<hr />
<p>And that’s it. Let’s make 2015 the best year yet.</p>
<ol id="footnotes">
<li id="fn1">Fun fact: My review of 2014 is the longest document I have ever written in my entire life, with the second place being a school report for a 2-week internship, which was around 2,200 words. Also, the school report took me about 2 months and help from my mother to complete, while the review took me like 5 days. This is also the reason why I need to point out the enormous length of the yearly review every time I talk about it. <a href="#ffn1">&#8617;</a></li>
</ol>Thu, 08 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/2014/
http://ninoan.com/2014/Kindle Typography<p>For years customers have been asking, practically begging, for hyphenation and an option for left-aligned text. Now (a few weeks ago), Amazon has announced the new generation of their ereader, the Kindle Voyage. And apparently it still lacks both features. <em>Wohoo.</em></p>
<p>Let’s talk about hyphenation first. I feel like this is the more important of the two, because you’d really want hyphenation no matter how the text is aligned. I do think that Amazon should implement auto-hyphenation, but on the other hand, I am kind of puzzled why publishers don’t provide hyphenation themselves, especially for books with lots of uncommon words, where auto-hyphenation would fail anyway. I run every book not bought through Amazon (because I’m too lazy to figure out how to break the DRM) through the hyphenation plugin in Calibre, which takes like five seconds and produces really good results that don’t interfere with search or dictionary lookups or annotations. As hard as it is to believe, it <em>actually</em> works — I’ve been reading hyphenated stuff every day for weeks now, and it’s amazing. The obvious trade-off is that you have to store about 500kb extra in a 5mb book, but the Kindle file format is so size-inefficient compared to epub that <em>that</em> shouldn’t matter anyway.</p>
<figure><img src="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/83659/nino.github.io-files/kindle-hyphenation.png" alt="This is at font size 4, so if you&#39;re not nearly blind, you should be able to get even better results by turning the size down a step or two."/><figcaption>This is at font size 4, so if you&#39;re not nearly blind, you should be able to get even better results by turning the size down a step or two.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Now, about the left-alignment problem. I have to admit, I actually like justified text. I’m fine with left-aligned text on the web and on home-printed documents, but I think (for the most part) books should be justified. Especially on the Kindle — I’m not sure why — left-aligned text looks kind of weird. I’ve tried it with and without hyphenation, and I’ve always felt like I’m looking at a cheap homemade document instead of an actual book. So even now, with all the terrible, awful, hideous gaps in the text, I still kind of prefer the status quo to the “fully-justified text needs to die”-mentality you see on the web these days. Also, in my experience, with hyphenation, justified text looks perfectly adequate.</p>
<p>That said, it’s completely baffling to me why they don’t give users the option to choose whichever alignment they prefer. The only reason I can think of is that non-tech-savvy authors upload their impossible-to-parse Word files to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Kindle_Direct_Publishing">KDP</a> and Amazon isn’t confident they can detect which parts of the text should be affected by the setting and which shouldn’t. But even that doesn’t seem overly plausible.</p>
<p>Humanity has figured out how to make printed books look awesome. It can’t be that hard to make ebooks look okay.</p>
Wed, 08 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/kindle/
http://ninoan.com/kindle/Home<p>It’s 21:30; I’m alone in my room. The doorbell rings, six or seven times in hurried succession. I freeze. I was about to go to sleep, but now I can’t. I put all my clothes back on, turn off the lights, and don’t move, try not to make a sound. I tell myself nothing bad is going to happen, but my pulse won’t slow down.</p>
<p>I wonder who is at the door. I don’t get surprise visitors. If the people at the door wanted to visit someone else in the house, they could ring <em>their</em> doorbell. If they lived somewhere in the building, they could use a key. The janitor doesn’t work that late, and besides, this was the front door of the house, not the door to my room. He knocks before entering my room, but he uses his key for the other door; so it’s not him, either. It’s way too late in the night for someone like that survey-woman who showed up earlier today. I contemplate using the intercom to ask who’s there, but I’m too scared. I pretend I’m not home.</p>
<p>A while later, I can hear the buzzing of the lock through the staircase, followed by voices and footsteps. I try not to breathe until there’s silence again. Then I wait for a few more minutes and go to bed, still afraid. My heart beats so violently I can feel it throughout my entire body.</p>
<p>Consciously, I know that I’m pretty safe where I am. Even when I go outside, my chances of getting into serious trouble are extremely slim. All this is just in my head. And I can live with an irrational fear of being robbed and beaten whenever I leave the house after dark, but when I can’t feel safe in my own home anymore, that’s another story. I need this one place to be my sanctuary, where no one can get to me, no matter what.</p>
<p>Maybe one day I’ll figure out how not to be so afraid of everything, and maybe then it’ll be okay when people ring my doorbell unannounced. But that day has not come yet. Right now, I’m scared to death every time that happens, and I can’t do anything about it—except whinge about it a lot, of course.</p>
Sat, 27 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/home/
http://ninoan.com/home/The Last Old Man’s Ghost Colony War Brigades<p>My fanfiction/review-type-thing of the first 3 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man%27s_War">Old Man’s War</a>
books.</p>
<p>Spoilers.</p>
<h1 id="old-mans-war">Old Man’s War</h1>
<p>In the beginning there was that annoying guy, but then he died, and
the rest was just lots of explosions and it was really exciting.</p>
<h1 id="the-ghost-brigades">The Ghost Brigades</h1>
<blockquote>
<p>“But it’s not what Jared wanted, is it?” Sagan said. “He knew his
consciousness had been recorded. He could have asked me to try to
save it. He didn’t.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Then they decide to do it anyway, and Jared says, “Thank goodness you
revived me. Between all the exploding things and people dying I
totally forgot that my consciousness had been recorded. I thought I
would have to sacrifice myself, but this is so much better!”</p>
<h1 id="the-last-colony">The Last Colony</h1>
<p>So John talks to General Rybicki, and he’s like,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And because you didn’t survey this planet well enough to know it
has its own goddamned intelligent species, seven of my colonists
have died in the last three days.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And then the General should have said, “Oh, yea, we noticed they were
here, but then we kinda forgot about them; that’s why we didn’t tell
you.”</p>
<p>And then John should have said, “Oh, well, we’ll just forget about
them, too, then,” because after that the only other occasion this
comes up is when John asks Gau what he’s going to do with them and Gau
says, “Meh, dunno,” and then forgets about it as well.</p>
<hr />
<p>Other than that the books were pretty entertaining, though.</p>
Mon, 18 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000http://ninoan.com/omw-review/
http://ninoan.com/omw-review/